The Project Gutenberg eBook of My adventures as a German secret agent
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: My adventures as a German secret agent
Author: Horst von der Goltz
Release date: April 21, 2025 [eBook #75931]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Cassell and company, ltd, 1918
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY ADVENTURES AS A GERMAN SECRET AGENT ***
MY ADVENTURES AS A GERMAN SECRET AGENT
[Illustration: The Bridgeman H. Taylor passport upon which von der Goltz
returned to Germany and later went to England. In the upper right hand
corner is the visé of the American Embassy at Berlin.]
My Adventures
AS A
German Secret Agent
BY
CAPT. HORST VON DER GOLTZ
FORMERLY MAJOR IN THE MEXICAN CONSTITUTIONAL ARMY.
SOMETIME CONFIDENTIAL AIDE TO CAPTAIN VON PAPEN,
RECALLED MILITARY ATTACHÉ TO THE IMPERIAL
GERMAN EMBASSY AT WASHINGTON,
GERMAN SECRET AGENT.
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
1917
Copyright, 1917
by
ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & COMPANY
Published, 1917
“One must at times separate a gentleman and a diplomat from his official
acts performed under orders from his home government, otherwise great
confusion and injustice will occur. Some governments have a little way of
telling those who represent them abroad ... to get such and such a thing
done, and done it must be. Nor would those high Government officials at
home care often to hear painful details of the successful execution of
many such orders which are given.”
from _“The Strangling of Persia,” by W. Morgan Shuster_.
TO THE
UNITED STATES OF GERMANY—WHENEVER
THEY MAY COME TO BE—I
DEDICATE THIS BOOK AND MY HOPES.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Foreword 1
I—I find an old letter, containing a strange bit of scandal—and
its contents draw me into the service of the Kaiser 5
II—I Impersonate a Russian Prince and steal a treaty. What the
treaty contained and how Germany made use of the knowledge 22
III—Of what comes of leaving important papers exposed. I look
and talk indiscreetly—and a man dies 45
IV—I am sent to Geneva and learn of a plot. How there are more
ways of getting rid of a King than by blowing him up with
dynamite 61
V—Germany displays an interest in Mexico, and aids the United
States for her own purposes. The Japanese-Mexican treaty
and its share in the downfall of Diaz 88
VI—My letter again. I go to America and become a United States
soldier. Sent to Mexico and sentenced to death there. I
join Villa’s army and gain an undeserved reputation 111
VII—War. I re-enter the German service and am appointed aide to
Captain von Papen. The German conception of neutrality and
how to make use of it. The plot against the Welland Canal 151
VIII—I go to Germany on a false passport. Italy in the early
days of the war. I meet the Kaiser and talk to him about
Mexico and the United States 173
IX—In England—and how I reached there. I am arrested and
imprisoned for fifteen months. What von Papen’s baggage
contained. I make a sworn statement 190
X—The German intrigue against the United States. Von Papen,
Boy-Ed and von Rintelen, and the work they did. How the
German-Americans were used and how they were betrayed 212
XI—More about the German intrigue against the United States.
German aims in Latin America. Japan and Germany in Mexico.
What happened in Cuba? 236
XII—The last stand of German intrigue. Germany’s spy system in
America. What is coming? 264
ILLUSTRATIONS
The false passport upon which Capt. von der Goltz went to
England FRONTISPIECE
FACING PAGE
Photograph of Capt. von der Goltz taken outside the Cuartel at
Juarez 28
Raul Madero and his staff 42
A group of recruits in Villa’s Army 42
Von der Goltz’s commission as Major in the Mexican
Constitutional Army 64
Colonel Trinidad Rodriguez, Capt. von der Goltz’s first
commander, and General Villa 88
General Raul Madero 88
A telegram from General Villa to Capt. von der Goltz 112
A group of Constitutional soldiers 124
The six months’ leave of absence from the Mexican Army, granted
to Capt. von der Goltz at the outbreak of the European War 140
A letter of recommendation given to Capt. von der Goltz by Raul
Madero 140
A letter from Dr. Kraske, German vice-consul at New York to
“Baron” von der Goltz 152
Captain von Papen’s letter to the German consuls at Baltimore
and St. Paul, asking for their assistance in Capt. von der
Goltz’s enterprise 166
How Capt. von der Goltz secured explosives for his Welland
Canal Expedition. Two communications from Capt. Tauscher 178
Bills from the du Pont de Nemours Powder Co. for “merchandise”
furnished Capt. von der Goltz 180
The check which almost cost Capt. von der Goltz his life 196
Safe Deposit receipts for papers which von der Goltz left in
Rotterdam 210
The British order for the deportation of Capt. von der Goltz 240
Photograph of the cover of the British white paper containing
Capt. von der Goltz’s confession 256
FOREWORD.
I have not attempted to write an autobiography. This book is merely
a summary—a sort of galloping summary—of the last ten years of my
existence. As such, I venture to write it because my life has been bound
up in enterprises in which the world is interested. It has been my
fortune to be a witness and sometimes an actor in that drama of secret
diplomacy which has been going on for so long and which in such a large
way has been responsible for this war.
There are many scenes from that drama that have no place in this
book—many events with which I am familiar that I have not touched upon.
My aim has been to describe only those things with which I was personally
concerned and which I know to be true. For a full history of the last
ten years my readers must go elsewhere; but it is my hope that these
adventures of mine will bring them to a better understanding of the
forces that have for so long been undermining the peace of the world.
Inevitably there will be some who read this book, who will doubt the
truth of many of the statements in it. I cannot, unfortunately, prove all
that I tell here. Wherever possible I have offered corroborative evidence
of the truth of my statements; at other times I have tried to indicate
their credibility by citing well recognized facts which have a direct
bearing upon my contentions. But for the rest, I can only hope that this
book will be accepted as a true record of facts which by their very
nature are insusceptible of proof.
So far as my connection with the German Government is concerned, I
may refer the curious to the British Parliamentary White Papers,
Miscellaneous Nos. 6 and 13, which contain respectively my confession
and a record of the papers found in the possession of Captain von Papen,
former military attaché to the German Embassy at Washington, and seized
by the British authorities on January 2 and 3, 1916. There are also, in
addition to the documents reproduced in this book, various court records
of the trial of Captain Hans Tauscher and others in the spring of the
same year. Of German activities in the United States, the newspapers bear
eloquent testimony. I have been concerned rather with the motives of
the German Government than with a statement of what has been done. These
motives, I believe, you will not doubt.
But there is one point which I must ask my readers not to overlook. I
have told that I became a secret agent through the discovery of a certain
letter which contained very serious reflections upon one of the most
important personages in the world. I have told, also, how the possession
of that letter had an important bearing upon the course of my life—how
it led me to America, and how in the struggle for its possession, I very
nearly lost my life. This, I know, will be severely questioned by many.
Before rejecting this part of my story, I ask merely that you consider
the fate that overtook Koglmeier, the saddler of El Paso, whose only
crime was that he had been partially in my confidence. I ask you to
recall that another German, Lesser, who had been associated with me at
the same time, mysteriously disappeared in 1915, shortly before von Papen
left for Europe. No one has been able to prove why these men were treated
as they were. And if I did not have in my possession _something_ which
the German Government regarded as highly important, why the surprising
actions of that Government, actions none the less astonishing because
they are well known and authenticated? Consider these things before you
doubt.
Finally, let me say that I have taken the liberty of changing or omitting
the names of various people who are mentioned in these adventures,
merely because I have had no wish to compromise them by disclosing their
identity.
[Illustration: H. von der Goltz]
New York, July 8, 1917.
_ERRATA_
_Page 5. Chapter I. First line_: March 28th, 1917 should read March 29th,
1916.
_Page 41_: Kut el Amerara should read Kut el Amara.
_Page 140. Last two paragraphs_: December 23rd should read December 20th.
_Page 171. Second paragraph_: October 8th should read October 3rd, 1914.
=Transcriber’s Note:= The errata have been corrected.
My Adventures as a German Secret Agent
CHAPTER I
_I find an old letter, containing a strange bit of scandal—and
its contents draw me into the service of the Kaiser._
On March 29th, 1916, the steamer _Finland_ was warped into its Hudson
River dock and I hurried down the gang plank. I was not alone. Agents
of the United States Department of Justice had met me at Quarantine;
and a man from Scotland Yard was there also—a man who had attended me
sedulously since, barely two weeks before, I had been released under
rather unusual circumstances from Lewes prison in England; the last of
four English prisons in which I had spent fifteen months in solitary
confinement waiting for the day of my execution.
My friend from Scotland Yard left me very shortly; soon after, I was
testifying for the United States Government against Capt. Hans Tauscher,
husband of Mme. Johanna Gadski, the diva. Tauscher, American agent of
the Krupps and of the German Government, was charged with complicity in
a plot to blow up the Welland Canal in Canada during the first month of
the Great War. During the course of the trial it was shown that von Papen
and others (including myself) had entered into a conspiracy to violate
the neutrality of the United States. I had led the expedition against the
Welland Canal and I was telling everything I knew about it. Doubtless you
remember the newspapers of the day.
You will remember how, at that time, the magnitude of the German plot
against the neutrality of the United States became finally apparent. You
will remember how, in connection with my exposure came the exposure of
von Igel, of Rintelen, of the German Consul-General at San Francisco,
Bopp, and many others. With all of these men I was familiar. In the
activities of some of them I was implicated. It was I, as I have said,
who planned the details of the Welland Canal plot. I shall tell the true
story of these activities later on.
But first let me tell the story of how I became to be concerned in these
plots—and to do that I must go back over many years; I must tell how I
first became a member of the Kaiser’s Secret Diplomatic Force (to give
it a name) and incidentally I shall describe for the first time the real
workings of that force.
* * * * *
I have been in and out of the Kaiser’s web for ten years. I have served
him faithfully in many capacities and in many places—all over Europe,
in Mexico, even in the United States. I served the German Government as
long as I believed it to be representing the interests of my countrymen.
But from the moment that I became convinced that the men who made up
the Government—the Hohenzollerns, the Junkers and the bureaucrats—were
anxious merely to preserve their own power, even at the expense of
Germany itself, my attitude toward them changed. That is why I write this
book—and why I shall tell what I know of the aims and ambitions of these
men—enemies of Germany as well as of the rest of the world.
I was not a spy; nor was I a secret service agent. I was, rather, a
secret diplomatic agent. Let me add that there is a nice distinction
between the three. A secret diplomatic agent is a man who directs
spies, who studies their reports, who pieces together various bits of
information, and who, when he has the fabric complete, personally makes
his report to the highest authority or carries that particular plan to
its desired conclusion. His work and his status are of various sorts.
Unlike the spy, he is a user, not a getter, of information. He is a free
lance, responsible only to the Foreign Office; a plotter; an unofficial
intermediary in many negotiations; and frequently he differs from an
accredited diplomatic representative, only in that his activities and
his office are essentially secret. Obviously men of this type must be
highly trained and reliable; and their constant association with men of
authority makes it necessary that they, themselves, be men of breeding
and education. But above all, they must possess the courage that shrinks
at no danger, and a devotion, a patriotism that knows no scruples.
This, then, was the calling into which I found myself plunged, while
still a boy, by one of the strangest chances that ever befell me, whose
life has been full of strange happenings.
As I recall my adolescence I realize that I was a normal boy, vigorous,
wilful, fond of sport, of horses, dogs and guns, and I know that but for
the chance I speak of, I should have grown up to the traditions of our
family—Cadet school—the University—later a lieutenancy in the German
Army—and to-day, perhaps, death “somewhere in France.”
And yet, in that boyhood that I am recalling, I can remember that there
were other interests which were far greater than the games that I loved,
as did all lads of my age. Mental adventure, the matching of wits against
wits for stakes of reputation and fortune, always exercised an uncanny
fascination over my mind. That delight in intrigue was shown by the books
I read as a boy. In the library of my father’s house there were many
novels, books of poems, of biography, travel, philosophy and history; but
I passed them by unread. His few volumes of court gossip and so-called
“secret history” I seized with avidity. I used to bear off the memoirs of
Maréchal Richelieu, the Cardinal’s nephew, and read them in my room when
the rest of the household was asleep.
I recall, too, that there was another tendency already developed in me. I
see it in my dealings with other boys of that day. It was the impulse to
make other people my instruments, not by direct command or appeal, but by
leading them to do, apparently for themselves, what I needed of them.
Such was I, when my aunt who had cared for me since the death of my
parents some years before, fell ill and later died. I was disconsolate
for a time and wandered about through the halls and chambers of the
house, seeking amusement. And it was thus that one day I came upon an
old chest in the room that had been hers. I remembered that chest. There
were letters in it—letters that had been written to her by friends made
in the old days when she was at court. Often she had read me passages
from them—bits of gossip about this or that personage whom she had once
known—occasionally, even, mention of the Kaiser.
Doubtless, too, I thought, there were passages which she had not seen fit
to read to me: some more intimate bits of gossip about those brilliant
men and women in Berlin whom I then knew only as names. With the eager
curiosity of a boy I sought the key, and in a moment had unlocked the
chest.
There they lay, those neat, faded bundles, slightly yellow, addressed
in a variety of hands. Idly I selected a packet and glanced over the
envelopes it contained, lingering, in anticipation of the revelations
that might be in them. I must have read a dozen letters before my eye
fell upon the envelope that so completely changed my life.
It lay in a corner of the chest, as if hidden from too curious eyes—a
yellow square of paper, distinguished from its fellows by the quality of
the stationery alone, and by its appearance of greater age. But I knew,
before I had read fifty words of it, that I was holding in my hands a
document that was more explosive than dynamite!
For this letter, written to my aunt years before, by one of the most
exalted personages in all of Germany, contained statements which, had
they been made by any one else, would have been treason to utter, and
_which cast the most serious doubts upon the legitimacy of the Kaiser,
Wilhelm II_.
I realize fully that what I have written will seem grossly improbable to
most of my readers. I know that few persons will believe me. And since
I cannot prove what I have said, since the letter is no longer in my
possession, I can ask you only to consider the facts and to weigh for
yourself the probabilities of my statement.
Those of you whose memories go back to the last twenty years of the
nineteenth century, will readily recall the notorious ill-feeling that
existed between Wilhelm II and his mother, Victoria, the Dowager Empress
Friederich. Stories have too often been told of this enmity, culminating
in the virtual banishment from Berlin of the Queen Mother, for me to
need do more than mention them. But what is not so generally known is
the small esteem in which Victoria was held by the entire German people.
During the twenty years of her married life as the wife of the then
Crown Prince Friederich, she was treated by Berlin society with the
most thinly-veiled hostility. Even Bismarck made no attempt to conceal
his dislike for her, and accused her—to quote his own words—of having
“poisoned the fountain of Hohenzollern blood at its source.”
Victoria, for her part, although she seems to have had no animosity
toward the German people, certainly possessed little love for her eldest
son, and did her best to delay his ascension to the Imperial throne as
long as she could. When in 1888 Wilhelm I was dying, she tried her utmost
to secure the succession to her husband, who was then lying dangerously
ill at San Remo. “Cancer,” the physicians pronounced the trouble, and
even the great German specialist, Bergman, agreed with their diagnosis.
There is a law that prevents any one with an incurable disease, such
as cancer, from ascending the Prussian throne; but Victoria knew too
well the attitude of her son, Wilhelm, toward herself, not to wish to do
everything in her power to prevent him from becoming Emperor so long as
she could. In her extremity she appealed to her mother, Queen Victoria of
England, who sent Mackenzie, the great English surgeon, to San Remo to
report on Friederich’s condition. Mackenzie opposed Bergman and said the
disease was _not_ cancer; and the physicians inserted a silver tube in
Friederich’s throat, and in due course he became Emperor Friederich III.
But in spite of Mackenzie and the silver tube, Friederich III died after
a reign of ninety-eight days—and he died of cancer.
Now what was the reason for this hostility between mother and son
and between Empress and subjects? There have been many answers
given—Victoria’s love for England, her colossal lack of tact, her
impatient unconventionality. Berlin whispered of a dinner in Holland
years before, when Victoria had entertained some English people she
met there—people she had never seen before—and had finished her
repast by smoking a cigar. That in the days when the sight of a
woman smoking horrified the German soul! And Berlin hinted at worse
unconventionalities than this.
As for the animosity of the Kaiser, that was attributed to the fact that
he held her responsible for his withered left arm.
Plausible reasons, all of these, and possibly true. But consider, if
you will, the rumors that followed Victoria all her life—the story of
an early attachment to the Count Seckendorf, her husband’s associate
during the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866—the reports, sometimes denied but
generally believed, of her marriage to the Count not long before her
death. Consider, too, the dissimilarity between the Kaiser and the other
men of his race—big, slow-minded, amiable men—so unlike Wilhelm II, with
his aggressive, alert personality, his quick mind and his Piedmontese
face. And can you not imagine the attitude of a woman who had been guilty
of infidelity and yet retained her sense of national honor—the hesitancy
she might feel at seeing the child of this infidelity upon the throne,
and so perpetrating a gigantic fraud upon a people and a husband whom she
respected if she did not love? And have not women been known to hate,
rather than love, the offspring of a guilty union?
True or not, these suppositions—what does it matter? You can see, can
you not, why I believed that my letter told the truth, and why I knew
that here was a plaything which would astound the world, if made public?
But what to do with this letter to which I attached so much importance?
Something impelled me not to speak of it to my family. But who else was
there?
In my perplexity I did an utterly foolish thing. I put my whole
confidence in a man’s word. There was, serving at a nearby fortress, a
General Major von Dassel, who was in the habit of coming to our house
quite regularly. To him I went, and under pledge of silence I told him my
story. Of course, he broke the pledge and left immediately for Berlin.
All doubts, if I had any, as to the importance of the document vanished
with him. And if I had any misgivings concerning my own importance they
quickly vanished, too. Back from Berlin, with General Major von Dassel
came an agent of the _Reichs Kanzler_. He did not come to our house;
instead von Dassel sent for me to go to his headquarters in the fortress.
I met there a solemn frock-coated personage who, so he said, had come
down from Berlin especially to see me. Imagine my elation! I was in
my element; what I had hoped for had at last happened. The pages of
Richelieu and of my secret histories were coming true. Another man and I
were to lock our wits in a fight to the finish—that pleasure I promised
myself. He was a worthy opponent, an official, a professional intriguer.
As I looked into his serious, bearded face, I built romances about him.
The agent of the Chancellor wanted my document and my pledge to keep
silent about its contents. Through sheer love of combat, I refused him
on both points. He tried persuasion and reason. I was adamant. He tried
cajolery.
“It is plain,” he said, in a voice that was caressingly agreeable, “that
you are an extremely clever young man. I have never before met your
like—that is, at your age. A great career will be possible to such a
young man if only he shows himself eager to serve his government, eager
to meet the wishes of his Chancellor.”
Of course, I was delighted with this flattery, which I felt was entirely
deserved. I began to believe that I was a person of importance. I became
stubborn—which always has been one of my best and worst traits. I saw
that the gentleman in the frock-coat was becoming angry; his serious eyes
flashed. Apparently much against his will, he tried threats; he suavely
pointed out that if I persisted in my resolve not to turn over the
document, destruction yawned at my feet. The threats touched off the fuse
of my romanticism. I felt I was leading the life of intrigue of which I
had read.
“If you will wait here,” I told him, “I shall go home and get the
document for you.”
The Chancellor’s representative stroked his beard, deliberated a moment
and seemed uncertain.
“Oh, the Junge will come back all right,” put in the General Major von
Dassel. But the Junge did not come back. My family had always been
excessively liberal with money, and I had enough in my own little “war
chest” to buy a railroad ticket, and a considerable amount besides. So
I promptly ran off to Paris; and to this day I don’t know how long the
gentleman in the frock-coat waited for me in von Dassel’s office.
The terrors and thrills and delight of that panic stricken flight
still make me smile. No peril I have since been through was half as
exciting.... Berlin!... Köln!... Brussels! It was a race against
apprehension. I was happily frightened, much as a colt is, when it shies
at its own shadow. Although I was in long trousers and looked years
older than I was, I had not sense enough to see the affair in its true
light—a foolish escapade which was quite certain to have disagreeable
consequences. And so I fled from Berlin to Paris.
From Paris I fled, too. There, any circumstance struck my fevered
imagination as being suspicious. After a day in the French capital,
I scurried south to Nice and from Nice to Monte Carlo. Precocious
youngster, indeed, for there I had my first experience with that favored
figure of the novelist, the woman secret agent. No novelist, I venture to
say, would ever have picked her out of the Riviera crowd as being what
she was. She wore no air of mystery; and though attractive enough in a
quiet way, she was very far from the siren type in looks or manners. The
friendliness that she, a woman of the mid-thirties, showed a lonely boy
was perfectly natural. I should never have guessed her to be an agent
of the Wilhelmstrasse had she not chosen to let me know it. Of course,
the moment she spoke to me of “my document,” I knew she had made my
acquaintance with a purpose. If the dear old frock-coated agent of the
Chancellor had been asleep, the telegraph wires from Berlin to Paris and
Nice and Monte Carlo had been quite awake.
The proof that I was actually watched and waited for thrilled me anew.
It also alarmed me when my friend explained how deeply my government was
affronted. Soon the alarm outgrew the thrill and in the end I quite broke
down. Then the woman in her, touched with pity, apparently displaced the
adventuress. We took counsel together and she showed me a way out.
“Your document,” she said, “has a Russian as well as a German importance.
Why not try Petersburg since Berlin is hostile? For the sake of what you
bring, Russia might give shelter and protection.”
Remember, I was very young and she was all kindness. Yes, she discovered
for me the avenue of escape and she set my foot upon it in the most
motherly way. And I unknowingly took my first humble lesson in the great
art of intrigue. For as I learned years afterwards, that woman was not a
German agent but a Russian!
But at that time I was all innocent gratitude for her kindness. I was
thankful enough to proceed to Petersburg by way of Italy, Constantinople
and Odessa. Of course, she must have designated a man unknown to me to
travel with me, and make sure that I reached the Russian capital. To my
hotel in Petersburg, just as the woman had predicted, came an officer of
the political police, who courteously asked me not to leave the building
for twenty-four hours. The next day the man from the _Okrana_ came again.
This time he had a droshky waiting, with one of those bull-necked, blue
corduroy-robed, muscular Russian jehus on the box. We were driven down
the Nevsky-Prospect to a palace. Here I soon found myself in the presence
of a man I did not then know as Count Witte. He greeted me kindly, merely
remarking that he had heard I was in some difficulties, and offering me
aid and advice. My letter was not referred to and the interview ended.
So began the process of drawing me out. A fortnight later the matter of
my information was broached openly and the suggestion was made that if I
delivered it to the Russian Government, high officials would be friendly
and a career assured me in Russia, as I grew up. But by that time Germany
had changed her attitude. Her agents also reached me in St. Petersburg.
From them I received new assurance of the importance of the document. If
I would release it—so the German agent who came to my hotel told me—and
keep my tongue still, Berlin would pardon my indiscretion and assure
me a career at home. Russia or Germany? My decision was quickly made.
That very night I was smuggled out of Petersburg and whisked across the
frontier at Alexandrovna, into Germany; and the letter passed out of my
hands—for the time being.
CHAPTER II.
_I Impersonate a Russian Prince and steal a treaty. What the
treaty contained and how Germany made use of the knowledge._
Gross Lichterfelde! As I write, it all comes back to me clearly, in spite
of the full years that have passed—this, my first home in Berlin. A huge
pile of buildings set in a suburb of the city, grim and military in
appearance; and in fact, as I soon discovered.
I was to become a cadet, it seems; and where in Germany could one receive
better training than in this same Gross Lichterfelde?
At home I had had some small experience with the exactions of the
_gymnasium_; but now I found that this was but so much child’s play
in comparison to the life at Gross Lichterfelde. We were drilled
and dragooned from morning till night: mathematics, history, the
languages—they were not taught us, they were literally pounded into us.
And the military training! I am not unfamiliar with the curricula of
Sandhurst, of St. Cyr, even of West Point, but I honestly believe that
the training we had to undergo was fully as arduous and as technical as
at any of those schools. And we were only boys.
Military strategy and tactics; sanitation; engineering; chemistry; in
fact, any and every study that could conceivably be of use to these
future officers of the German Army; to all of these must we apply
ourselves with the utmost diligence. And woe to the student who shirked!
Then there was the endless drilling, that left us with sore muscles and
minds so worn with the monotony of it that we turned even to our studies
with relief. And the supervision! Our very play was regulated.
Can you wonder that we hated it and likened the cadet school to a prison?
And can you imagine how galling it was to me, who had come to Berlin
seeking romance and found drudgery?
But we learned. Oh, yes. The war has shown how well we learned.
There was one relief from the constant study which was highly prized by
all the cadets at Gross Lichterfelde. It was the custom to select from
our school a number of youths to act as pages at the Imperial court;
and lucky were the ones who were detailed to this service. It meant a
vacation, at the very least, to say nothing of a change from the Spartan
fare of the cadet school.
I must have been a student for a full three months before my turn came;
long enough, at any rate, for me to receive the news of my selection
with the utmost delight. But I had not been on service at the Imperial
Palace for more than a few days when a state dinner was given in honor
of a guest at court. He was a young prince of a certain grand-ducal
house, which by blood was half Russian and half German. I recall the
appearance of myself and the other pages, as we were dressed for the
function. Ordinarily we wore a simple undress cadet uniform, but that
evening a striking costume was provided: nothing less than a replica
of the garb of a mediaeval herald—tabard and all—for Wilhelm II has a
flair for the feudal. From my belt hung a capacious pouch, which, pages
of longer standing than I assured me, was the most important part of my
equipment; since by custom the ladies were expected to keep these pouches
comfortably filled with sweetmeats. Candy for a cadet! No wonder every
boy welcomed his turn at page duty, and went back reluctantly to the
asceticism of Gross Lichterfelde.
That was my first sight of an Imperial dinner. The great banquet
hall that overlooks the square on the Ufer, was ablaze with lights.
The guests—the men in their uniforms even more than the women—made a
brilliant spectacle to the eyes of a youngster from the provinces; but
most brilliant of all was Wilhelm II, resplendent in the full dress
uniform of a field marshal. I can recall him as he sat there, lordly,
arrogant, yet friendly, but never seeming to forget the monarch in the
host. It seemed to me that he loved to disconcert a guest with his
remarks; it delighted him to set the table laughing at some one’s else
expense.
By chance, during the banquet, it fell to me to render service to the
young prince. Once, as I moved behind his chair, a German Princess
exclaimed, “Oh, doesn’t the page resemble his Highness?”
The Kaiser looked at me sharply.
“Yes,” he agreed, “they might well be twins.” Then, impulsively lifting
up his glass, he flourished it toward the Russo-German prince and drank
to him.
That was all there was to the incident—then. I returned to Gross
Lichterfelde the next morning, and proceeded to think no more of the
matter. Nor did it come to my mind when a few weeks later, I was
suddenly summoned to Berlin, and driven, with one of my instructors, to
a private house in a street I did not know. (It was the Wilhelmstrasse,
and the residence stood next to Number 75, the Foreign Office. It was
the house Berlin speaks of as Samuel Meyer’s _Bude_—in other words, the
private offices of the Chancellor and His Imperial Majesty.)
We entered a room, bare save for a desk or two and a portrait of Wilhelm
I, where my escort surrendered me to an official, who silently surveyed
me, comparing his observations with a paper he held, which apparently
contained my personal measurements. Later a photograph was taken of me,
and then I was bidden to wait. I waited for several hours, it seemed to
me, before a second official appeared—a large, round-faced man, soldierly
despite his stoutness—who greeted my escort politely and, taking a
photograph from his pocket, proceeded to scrutinize me carefully. After a
moment he turned to my escort.
“Has he any identifying marks on his body?” he asked.
My escort assured him that there were none.
“Good!” he exclaimed; and a moment later we were driving back toward
Gross Lichterfelde—I quite at sea about the whole affair, but not daring
to ask questions about it. Idle curiosity was not encouraged among cadets.
I was not to remain in ignorance for long, however. A few days later I
was ordered to pack my clothing, and with it was transferred to a quiet
hotel on the Dorotheen Strasse. The hotel was not far from the War
Academy, and there I was placed under the charge of an exasperatingly
puttering tutor, who strove to perfect me on but three points. He
insisted that my French be impeccable; he made me study the private and
detailed history of a certain Russian house; and he was most particular
about the way I walked and ate, about my knowledge of Russian ceremonies
and customs—in a word, about my deportment in general.
The weeks passed. At last, by dint of much hard work, I became
sufficiently expert in my studies to satisfy my tutor. I was taken back
to the house on the Wilhelmstrasse, where the round-faced man again
inspected me. He talked with me at length in French, made me walk before
him and asked me innumerable questions about the family history of
the house I had been studying. Finally he drew a photograph from his
pocket—the same, I fancy, which had figured in our previous interview.
“Do you recognize this face?” he inquired, offering me the picture.
I started. It might have been my own likeness. But no! That uniform
was never mine. Then in a moment I realized the truth and with the
realization the whole mystery of the last few weeks began to be clear to
me. The photograph was a portrait of the young Prince Z——; my double,
whom I had served at the banquet.
“It is a very remarkable likeness,” said the round-faced man. “And it
will be of good service to the Fatherland.”
He eyed me for a moment impressively before continuing.
“You are to go to Russia,” he told me. “Prince Z—— has been invited to
visit his family in St. Petersburg, and he has accepted the invitation.
But unfortunately Prince Z—— has discovered that he cannot go. You will,
therefore become the Prince—for the time being. You will visit your
family, note everything that is said to you and report to your tutor,
Herr ——, who will accompany you and give you further instructions.
“This is an important mission,” he added solemnly, “but I have no doubt
that you will comport yourself satisfactorily. You have been taught
everything that is necessary; and you have already shown yourself a young
man of spirit and some discretion. We rely upon both of these qualities.”
He bowed in dismissal of us, but as we turned to go he spoke again.
[Illustration: This photograph, taken outside the Cuartel at Juarez,
Mexico, shows von der Goltz (at the right), then a Major in the Mexican
Army, and Lieut. Leiva, a Mexican officer later reported killed in
battle.]
“Remember,” he was saying. “From this day you are no longer a cadet. You
are a prince. Act accordingly.”
That was all. We were out of the door and halfway to our hotel before I
realized to the full the great adventure I had embarked upon. Embarked?
Shanghaied would be the better term. I had had no choice in the matter,
whatsoever. I had not even uttered a word during the interview.
At any rate, that night I left for Petrograd—still St. Petersburg at that
time—accompanied by my tutor and two newly engaged valets, who did not
know the real Prince. Of what was ahead I had no idea, but as my tutor
had no doubts of the success of our mission, I wasted little time in
speculating upon the future.
What the real prince’s motive was in agreeing to the masquerade, and
where he spent his time while I was in Russia, I have never been able to
discover. From what followed, I surmise that he was strongly pro-German
in his sympathies but distrusted his ability to carry through the task in
hand.
In St. Petersburg I discovered that my “relatives”—whom I had known to
be very exalted personages—were inclined to be more than hospitable to
this young kinsman whom they had not seen in a long time. I found myself
petted and spoiled to a delightful degree; indeed I had a truly princely
time. The only drawback was that, as the constant admonitions of my
tutor reminded me, I could spend my princely wealth only in such ways as
my—shall I say, predecessor?—would have done. He, alas, was apparently a
graver youth than I.
So two weeks passed, while I was beginning to wish that the masquerade
would continue indefinitely, when one day my tutor sent for me.
“So,” he said, “We have had play enough, not so? Now we shall have work.”
In a few words he explained the situation to me. Russia, it seemed, was
about to enter into an agreement with England, regarding what appeared
to be practically a partitioning of Persia. Already a certain Baron B——
(let me call him) was preparing to leave St. Petersburg with instructions
to find out under what circumstances the British Government would enter
into pourparlers on the subject. Berlin, whose interests in the Near East
would be menaced by such an agreement, needed information—and delay. I
was to secure both. It was the old trick of using a little instrument to
clog the mechanism of a great machine.
Let me explain here a feature of the drawing up of international treaties
and agreements which, I think, is not generally understood. Most of us
who read in the newspapers that such and such a treaty is being arranged
between the representatives of two countries, believe that the terms
are even then being decided upon. As a matter of fact these terms have
long since been determined by other representatives of the two countries
concerned, and the present meeting is merely for the formal and public
ratification of a treaty that has already been secretly made. The usual
stages in the making of a treaty are three: First, an unofficial inquiry
by one government into the willingness or unwillingness of the other
government to enter into a discussion of the question at issue. This is
usually done by a man who has no official standing as a diplomat at the
moment, but whose affiliations with officials in the second country have
given him an influence there which will stand his government in good
stead. After a willingness has been expressed by both sides to enter into
discussions, official pourparlers are held in which the terms of the
agreement are discussed and decided upon. Finally the treaty is formally
ratified by the Foreign Ministers or special envoys of the countries
involved. This secrecy in the first two stages is necessitated by the
fear of meddling on the part of other governments, and also by a desire
on the part of any country making overtures to avoid a possible rebuff
from the other; and it explains why negotiations which are publicly
entered into never fail.
But to return to my adventures. My Government had learned of the
impending pourparlers between Britain and Russia; it knew that Baron
B——’s instructions would contain the conditions which Russia considered
desirable. What was necessary was to secure these instructions.
Now, my tutor had, long before this, seen to it that I should be on
friendly terms with various members of the baron’s household; and he had
been especially insistent that I pay a good deal of attention to the
young daughter of the house, whom I shall call Nevshka. I had wondered
at the time why he should do this; but I obeyed his instructions with
alacrity. Nevshka was charming.
Now I saw the purpose of this carefully fostered friendship.
“The baron will spend this evening at the club,” I was informed. “He
will return, according to his habit, promptly at twelve. You will visit
his house this evening, paying a call upon Nevshka. You will contrive
to set back the clock so that his home coming will be in the nature
of a surprise to her. The hour will be so late that she, knowing her
father’s strictness, will contrive to get you out of the house without
his seeing you. That is your opportunity! You must slip from the salon
into the rear hall—but do not leave the house. And if, young man, with
such an opportunity, you cannot discover where these papers are hidden
_and secure them_, you are unworthy of the trust that your government has
placed in you.”
I nodded my comprehension. In other words I was to take advantage of
Nevshka’s friendship in order to steal from her father—I was to perform
an act from which no gentleman could help shrinking. And I was going to
do it with no more qualms of conscience than, in time of war, I should
have felt about stealing from an enemy general the plan of an attack.
For countries are always at war—diplomatically. There is always a
conflict between the foreign ambitions of governments; always an attempt
on the part of each country to gain its own ends by fair means or foul.
Every man engaged in diplomatic work knows this to be true. And he
will serve his government without scruple, for well he knows that some
seemingly dishonorable act of his may be the means of averting that
actual warfare which is only the forlorn hope that governments resort to
when diplomatic means of mastery have failed.
So I undertook my mission with no hesitation, rather with a thrill
of eagerness. I pretended to be violently interested in Nevshka (no
difficult task, that) and time sped by so merrily that even had I not
turned back the hands of the clock, I doubt if the lateness of the hour
would have seriously concerned either of us. Oh, yes, my tutor—who, as
you of course have guessed by now, was no mere tutor—had analyzed the
situation correctly.
As the baron was heard at the door, I drew out my watch.
“Nevshka, your clock is slow. It is already midnight.”
Nevshka started.
“Come!” she exclaimed. “Father must not see you. He would be furious at
your being here at this hour.” In a panic she glanced about the salon.
“Go out that way.” And she pointed to a door at the rear, one that opened
on a dimly lit hallway.
I went. I heard the baron express his surprise that Nevshka was still
awake. I heard her lie—beautifully, I assure you. And I remained hidden
while the baron worked in his library for a while; hardly daring to
breathe until I heard him go up the stairs to his bedroom.
He was a careless man, the baron. Or perhaps he had been reading Poe,
and believed that the most obvious place of concealment was the safest.
At any rate, there in a drawer of his desk, protected only by the most
defenseless of locks, were the papers—a neat statement of the terms upon
which Russia would discuss this Persian matter with England.
I returned home with my prize, to find my tutor awaiting me. He said
no word of commendation when I gave him the papers, but I knew by his
expression that he was well pleased with my work. And I went to bed,
delighted with myself, and dreaming of the great things that were to come.
The next day we left Petersburg. A German resident of the city had
telephoned my relatives, warning them that a few cases of cholera had
appeared. Would it not, he suggested (Oh, it was mere kind thoughtfulness
on his part) be best to let the young prince return to Germany until the
danger was over? His parents would be worried. Indeed, it would be best,
my “relatives” agreed. So with regret they bade leave of me; and in the
most natural manner in the world I returned to Berlin.
Wilhelmstrasse 76 again! The round-faced man again, but this time less
military, less unbending, in his manner. I had done well, he told me.
My exploit had attracted the favorable attention of a very exalted
personage. If I could hold my tongue—who knows what might be in store for
me?
* * * * *
That was the end of the matter, so far as I was concerned. But in the
history of European politics it was only the beginning of the chapter.
It might be well, at this point, to recall the political situation
in Europe, as it affected England, Russia and Germany at this time.
Even two years before—in 1905—it had become evident to all students of
international affairs that the next great conflict, whenever it should
come, would be between England and Germany; and England realizing this,
had already begun to seek alliances which would stand between her and
German ambitions of world dominance. The Entente with France had been
the first step in the formation of protective friendships; and although
this friendship had suffered a strain during the Russo-Japanese War,
because of the opposing sympathies of the two countries, the end of the
war healed all differences. The defeat of Russia removed all immediate
danger of a Slavic menace against India. To England, then, the weakened
condition of Russia offered an excellent opportunity for an alliance that
would draw still more closely the “iron ring around Germany.” Immediately
she took the first steps leading toward this alliance.
Now, Russia stood badly in need of two things. War-torn and threatened by
revolution, the government could rehabilitate itself only by a liberal
amount of money. But where to get it? France, her ally, and normally
her banker, was slow, in this instance to lend—and it was only through
England’s intervention that the Czar secured from a group of Paris and
London bankers the money with which to finance his government and defeat
the revolution.
But more than money, Russia needed an ice-free seaport to take the
place of Port Arthur, which she had lost; and for this there were only
two possible choices: Constantinople or a port on the Persian Gulf. In
either of these aims she was opposed by Britain, the traditional enemy
of a Russian Constantinople, on the one hand, and the possessor of a
considerable “sphere of interest” in the Persian Gulf on the other.
So matters stood, when in August, 1907, _but a few weeks after my
masquerade_, Sir Arthur Nicholson, acting for England, and Alexander
Iswolsky, acting for Russia, signed the famous Anglo-Russian Agreement,
providing for the distribution of Persia into three strips, the northern
and southern of which would be respectively Russian and British zones of
influence; providing also, in a secret clause, that _Russia would give
England military aid in the event of a war between Germany and England_!
Meantime what was Germany doing?
She had, you may be sure, no intention of allowing England to best her
in the game of intrigue. Her interests in the Near East were commercial
rather than military; but she could not see them threatened by an
Anglo-Russian occupation of Persia, such as the Agreement portended.
Then, too, she was bound to consider the possible effect on Turkey, in
whom she was taking an ever-increasing (and none too altruistic) interest.
The details of what followed I can only surmise. I know that in the time
between my trip to Russia and the signing of that Agreement, on August
31, the Kaiser held two conferences: one on August 3, with the Czar at
Swinemunde; the other on August 14, with Edward VII, at the Castle of
Wilhelmshohe. And when, on September 24th, the terms were published, they
were bitterly attacked by a portion of the English press, not so much
because of the danger to Persia, as because of the fact that Russia got
the best of the bargain![1]
Had the Kaiser succeeded in having these terms changed? Who knows?
Certainly one can trace the hand of German diplomacy in the events of
the next seven years, most of which are a matter of common knowledge.
The steady aggressions of Russia in Persia during the troubled years of
1910-1912; the almost open flouting of the terms of the treaty, which
expressly guaranteed Persian integrity; the constant growth of German
influence, culminating in the Persian extension of the German-owned
Bagdad Railway; the founding of a German school and a hospital in
Teheran, jointly supported by Germany and Persia; and finally, the
celebrated Potsdam Agreement of 1910, between Russia and Germany, in
which Germany agreed to recognize Russia’s claim to Northern Persia as
its sphere of influence, which provided for a further rapprochement
between the two countries in the matter of railroad construction and
commercial development generally, and which has been generally supposed
to contain a guarantee that neither country would join “any combination
of Powers that has any aggressive tendency against the other.”
And England did not protest, in spite of the fact that the Potsdam
Agreement absolutely negatived her own treaty with Russia and made it,
in the language of one writer, “a farce and a deception!” Why? Was it
because she believed that when war came, as it inevitably must, Russia
would forget this new alliance in allegiance to the old?
England was mistaken, if she believed so. Russia—Imperial Russia—was
never so much the friend of Germany as when, neglecting the war on her
own Western front, she sent her armies into the Caucasus, persuaded the
British to undertake the Dardanelles expedition, and, following her own
plans of Asiatic expansion, betrayed England!
As I write this the Kut el Amara muddle is creating a great stir in the
allied countries. Lord Hardinge, Viceroy of India, and the government
of India have been severely blamed for sending General Townsend into
Mesopotamia with insufficient material, medical supplies and troops. At
the time that the move was made the explanation given for it was that it
was done in order to protect the oil pipes supplying the British navy
in those waters from being destroyed by the enemy. There was no doubt
in my mind at that time, in spite of the fact that I was in prison and
communication with the outside was very meagre, that this was not the
real reason. Subsequent developments have shown—and the abandonment of
the inquiry instituted by the British Government about this affair only
further supports my contention—that Russia intended to use England’s
helpless position to secure for herself an access to the Persian Gulf.
Grand Duke Nicholas himself abandoned the campaign on the Eastern front
to go to the Caucasus. The Gallipoli enterprise which turned out to be
such a monumental failure was undertaken upon his instigation. Do you
think for one second that if Imperial Russia had thought England was able
to capture Constantinople, a city which she herself has been wanting for
centuries, she would have invited England to do so? The fact is that
the Gallipoli enterprise tied up all of England’s available reserves so
that the English could practically do nothing to forestall the Russian
movements to the Persian Gulf. The Government of India, realizing the
danger, sent General Townsend upon the famous Bagdad campaign rather as a
demonstration, than as a military enterprise. I will quote from my diary
which I kept while in prison.
“Just read in _The Times_: ‘British moving north into Mesopotamia to
protect oil pipes and capture Bagdad.’ I don’t need to read _Punch_ any
more, _The Times_ being just as funny. My dear friends, you didn’t move
up there for that reason. You went up there so as to be able to tell
your Russian friends that there was no need to come further south as you
were there already.”
[Illustration: Raul Madero and Staff. Captain von der Goltz is standing
the second from the left.]
[Illustration: A group of recruits who came from the United States to
enter Villa’s Army. Captain von der Goltz is at the extreme left.]
As part of the Russian Army had already advanced as far as Kermansha,
General Townsend disregarded all military rules and tactics in his
desperate attempt to keep the Russians from going further South, paying
very little attention to securing his line of communication, and he was
subsequently cut off from his base and forced to surrender to the Turks.
In the early part of the war Russia did not try to gain anything at
the expense of Germany but consistently applied herself to the task of
enriching herself at the expense of England. Imperial Russia as an ally
has constantly been fighting England and done the Allied cause more
damage than the German army.
But Imperial Russia wrote her own death sentence by her treachery. There
was a revolution in Russia ...
But I anticipate.
* * * * *
That is the story of my little expedition into Russia—and of what it
brought about.
As for me, I was sent back to Gross Lichterfelde, where I abruptly ceased
to be a young prince, and became once more a humble cadet. But only to
outside eyes. Dazzled by the success of my first mission, I regarded
myself as a superman among the cadets. Life loomed romantically before
me. I told myself that I was to consort with princes and beautiful
noblewomen and to spend money lavishly. The future seemed to promise a
career that was the merriest, maddest, for which a man could hope.
I laugh sometimes now when I think of the dreams I had in those days. I
was soon to learn that the life which fate had thrust upon me was set
with traps and pitfalls which might not easily be escaped. I was to learn
many lessons and to know much suffering; and I was to discover that the
finding of my “document” was only the beginning of a chain of events that
were to control my whole life—and that its influence over my career had
not ended.
But at that time I was all hopes and rosy dreams—of my future, of myself,
occasionally of Nevshka.
Nevshka. Is she still as charming as ever?
CHAPTER III.
_Of what comes of leaving important papers exposed. I look and
talk indiscreetly—and a man dies._
In spite of my dreams and extreme self-satisfaction, I found the
atmosphere of Gross Lichterfelde as drab and monotonous as ever it had
been before my masquerade. Discipline sits lightly upon one who is
accustomed to it solely, but to me, fresh from a glorious fortnight of
intrigue and festivity, it was doubly galling. Yet there was one avenue
of escape open to me, that was denied my fellows, for I was required to
pay a weekly visit to my tutor in the Wilhelmstrasse, there to continue
my studies in the art of diplomatic intrigue.
It is a significant comment upon the life at Gross Lichterfelde that I
could regard these visits as a kind of relaxation. Surely no drill-master
was ever so exacting as this tutor of mine. And yet, despite his dryness
and the complete lack of cordiality in his manner, there was somewhere
the gleam of romance about him. To me he seemed, in a strangely
inappropriate way, an incarnation of one of those old masters of intrigue
who had been my heroes in former days at home; and my imagination
distorted him into a gigantic, shadowy being, mysterious, inflexible and
potentially sinister.
We studied history together that autumn; not the dull record of facts
that was forced upon us at Gross Lichterfelde, but rather a history
of glorious national achievement, of ambitions attained and enemies
scattered—a history that had the tone of prophecy. And I would sit there
in the soft autumn sunlight viewing the Fatherland with new eyes; as a
knight in shining armor, beset by foes, but ever triumphing over them by
virtue of his righteousness and strength of arm.
Then I would return to Gross Lichterfelde and its discipline.
Yet even at Gross Lichterfelde, we contrived to amuse ourselves, chiefly
by violating regulations. That is generally the result of walling any
person inside a set of rules; his attention becomes centered on getting
outside. Your own cadets at West Point, so I have been told, have their
traditional list of deviltries, maintained with admirable persistence
in the face of severe penalties. At Gross Lichterfelde one proved his
manliness by breaking bounds at least once a week, to drink beer, and
flirt with maids none the less divine because they were hopelessly
plebian.
In the prevailing lawlessness, I bore my share, and in the course of my
escapades, I formed an offensive and defensive alliance with a cadet of
my own age against that common enemy of all our kind, the Commandant of
the school, Willi von Heiden, I will call my chum, because that was not
his name. We became close friends. And through our friendship there came
an event which I shall remember to my last day. It gave me a glimpse into
the terrible pit of secret diplomacy.
Often at the present, I find myself living it over in my mind. If I
have learned to take a lighter view of life than most men, my attitude
dates from that time when a careless word of mine, spoken in innocence,
condemned a man to death. I will try to tell very briefly how it came
about.
The Christmas after my excursion to St. Petersburg I was invited by Willi
von Heiden to visit him at his home. His father was a squireling of East
Prussia, one of the _Junkers_. He had an estate in that rolling farm land
between Goldap and Tilsit, which was the scene of countless adventures
of Willi’s boyhood.
Just before we left Gross Lichterfelde—yes, even there they allow you a
few days vacation at Christmas—Willi received a letter and came to me
with a joyous face.
“Good news,” he cried, “we are sure to have a lively holiday. Brother
Franz is getting a few days’ leave, too.”
I had heard much of Willi’s older brother, Franz. He was a young man
in the middle twenties, an officer of a famous fighting regiment of
foot, one of the Prussian Guards. Willi had dilated upon him in his
conversation with me. Franz was his younger brother’s hero. From all
accounts Franz von Heiden was possessed of a mind of that rare sort which
combines unremitting industry with cleverness. His future as a soldier
seemed brilliant and assured.
“Where is Franz?” was Willi’s first question when we reached his home.
I shall be long forgetting my first impressions of the man. I had been
looking for a dry, spectacled student, or a stiff young autocrat of the
thoroughly Prussian type, which I, like many other Germans, thoroughly
disliked and inwardly laughed at. Instead, I found another chum. Franz
was an engaging young man of slight build but very vigorous and athletic.
I found him frank, friendly, unassuming, apparently wholly carefree and
full of quiet drollery. From his first greeting any prejudice that I
might have formed from hearing my chum, Willi, chant his excellencies,
was quite wiped away. And as the days passed I found myself drawn to seek
Franz’s company constantly. I have no doubt it flattered my vanity—always
awake since my exploit in St. Petersburg—to find this older man treating
me as a mental equal. It seemed to me that he differentiated between me
and Willi, who was quite young in manner as well as years. At times the
impulse was very strong for me to confide in Franz, to let him know that
I was not a mere cadet, that I had been in Russia for my government.
Luckily for myself I suppressed that impulse. Luckily for me, but very
unluckily for Lieutenant Franz von Heiden—as it turned out.
One sunny December morning we were all three going out rabbit shooting.
While Willi counted out shells in the gun room, I went to summon Franz
from the bedroom he was using as his study. It was characteristic of him
that without any assumption of importance, he gave a few hours to work
early every morning, even while on leave. I found him intent upon some
large sheets of paper, but he pushed them aside.
“Time to start now?” he asked. “Good! Wait a minute, while I dress.” He
stepped into the adjoining dressing-room.
And then, as if Fate had taken a hand in the moment’s activities, I did
a thing which I have never ceased to regret. Fate! Why not? What is
the likelihood that by mere vague chance I, of all the cadets of Gross
Lichterfelde, should have become Willi von Heiden’s chum and shared
his holidays? That by mere chance I should have been an inmate of his
home when Franz was there, three days out of the whole year? That by
mere chance, I, with my precocious knowledge and thirst for yet more
knowledge, should have entered his study when he was occupied with a
particular task? Why did I not send the servant to call him? And why,
instead of doing any one of the dozen other things I might have done
while I was waiting for Franz to change his clothes, should I have
stepped across and looked at the big sheets of paper on his table?
I did just that. I did it quite frankly and without a thought of prying.
I saw that the sheets were small scale maps. They were the maps of a
fort and the names upon them were written both in French and in German.
The thrill of a great discovery shot all through me. It flashed upon
me that I had heard Willi say that during the previous summer Franz
had spent a long furlough in the Argonne section of France. He had
been fishing and botanizing—so Willi had said. Indeed, only the night
before Franz himself had told us stories of the sport there; and all
his family had accepted the stories at their face value. So had I until
that moment when I stood beside his desk and saw the plans of a French
field fortress. Then I knew the truth. Lieutenant Franz von Heiden was
doing important work—so confidential that even his family must be kept in
ignorance about it—for the intelligence department of the German General
Staff. Like me, he was entitled to the gloriously shameful name of spy!
If I had obeyed my natural impulse to rush into Franz’s room and exchange
fraternal greetings with this new colleague of the secret service, so
romantically discovered, he might have saved himself. Instead, something
made me play the innocent and be the innocent, too, as far as intent was
concerned.
When Franz returned, dressed for the shoot, I was standing looking out
of his window, and I said nothing about my discovery.
We had our rabbit shoot that day. We crowded all the fun and energy
possible into it. It was our last day together and by sundown I felt as
close to Franz von Heiden as though he were my own brother. A few days
later Willi and I went back to Gross Lichterfelde.
Shortly after I returned from my Christmas leave, my tutor sent for me.
He even recognized the amenities of the occasion enough to unbend a
little and greeted me with a trace of mechanical friendliness.
“I trust you had a pleasant holiday,” he said, “you told me, did you not,
that you were to spend it at the Baron von Heiden’s?”
That touch of friendliness was the occasion of my tragic error. I
remember that I plunged into a boisterous description of my vacation, of
the pleasant days in the country, of the shooting, of Franz. As my tutor
listened, with a tolerant air, I told him what a splendid fellow Franz
was, how cleverly he talked and how diligently he worked. And then, with
a rash innocence for which I have never forgiven myself, I told him of
what I had seen on that day of the rabbit shooting—of the maps on the
table. Franz was one of us!
But my tutor was not interested. Abruptly he interrupted my burst of
gossip; and soon after that he plunged me into a quiz in spoken French.
My progress in that seemed his only preoccupation.
A month later Willi von Heiden staggered into my room. “Franz is dead,”
he said.
The brilliant young lieutenant, Franz von Heiden, had come to a sudden
and shocking end. He was shot dead in a duel. His opponent was a brother
officer, a Captain von Frentzen. The “Court of honor” of the regiment had
approved of the duel and it was reported that the affair was carried out
in accordance with the German code.
Later I learned the story. Captain von Frentzen was suddenly attached to
the same regiment as Franz. His transfer was a cause of great surprise
to the officers and of deep displeasure to them, for the captain had a
notorious reputation as a duelist. Naturally the officers, Franz among
them, had ignored him, trying to force him out of the regiment. Upon the
night of a regimental dance, the situation came to a head.
In response to the gesture of a lady’s fan Franz crossed the ball room
hurriedly. He was caught in a sudden swirl of dancers and accidentally
stepped on Captain von Frentzen’s foot. In the presence of the
whole company von Frentzen dealt Franz a stinging slap in the face.
“Apparently,” he sneered, “you compel me to teach you manners.” Franz
looked at him, amazed and furious. There was nothing that he had done
which warranted von Frentzen’s action. It was an outrage—a deadly insult.
There was but one thing to do. A duel was arranged.
To understand more of this incident you must understand the unyielding
code of honor of the German officer. Franz von Heiden’s original offense
had been so very slight that even had he refused to apologize to Frentzen
the consequences might not have been serious. But Frentzen’s blow given
in public was quite a different matter. It was a mortal affront. I heard
that Franz’s captain had been in a rage about it.
“My best lieutenant,” he had said to the colonel. “An extremely
valuable man. To be made to fight a duel with that worthless butcher,
von Frentzen. Shameful! God knows that laws are sometimes utterly
unreasonable by many of our ideas, as officers are equally senseless. I
have racked my brain to find a way out of this difficulty, but it seems
impossible. Can’t you do something to interfere?”
The colonel looked at him steadily. “Your honest opinion. Is von Heiden’s
honor affected by Frentzen’s action?”
There was nothing Franz’s captain could do but reply, “Yes.”
The duel was held on the pistol practice grounds of the garrison, a
smooth, grassy place, surrounded by high bushes; at the lower end there
was a shed built of strong boards, in which tools and targets were
stored. At daybreak Franz von Heiden and his second dismounted at the
shed and fastened their horses by the bridle. They stood side by side,
looking down the road, along which a carriage was coming. Captain von
Frentzen, his second, and the regimental surgeon got out. Sharp polite
greetings were exchanged. On the faces of the seconds there was a
singular expression of uneasiness, but Frentzen looked as though he were
there for some guilty purpose. The prescribed attempts at reconciliation
failed. The surgeon measured off the distance. He was a long-legged man
and made the fifteen paces as lengthy as possible.
Just at this moment the sun came up fully. Pistols were loaded and given
to Franz and Frentzen. Fifteen paces apart, the two men faced each
other. One of the seconds drew out his watch, glanced at it and said,
“I shall count; ready, one! then three seconds; two!—and again three
seconds; then, stop! Between one and stop the gentlemen may fire.” He
glanced round once more. The four officers stood motionless in the level
light of the dawn. He began to count. Presently Franz von Heiden was
stretched out upon the ground, his blue eyes staring up into the new day.
He lay still....
When I heard that story I ceased to be a boy. My outlook on the future
had been that of an irresponsible gamester, undergoing initiation into
the gayest and most exciting sports. All at once my eyes were hideously
opened and I looked down into the pit that the German secret service
had prepared for Franz von Heiden, and knew I _was the cause of it_. It
was terrible! By leaving that map where I could see it Franz von Heiden
had been guilty of an unforgivable breach of trust. By his carelessness
he had let someone know that the Intelligence Department of the General
Staff had procured the plans of a French fortress in the Argonne.
Wherefore, according to the iron law of that soulless war machine, Franz
von Heiden must die.
And this is the sinister way it works. Trace it. I innocently betray him
to my tutor, an official of the Secret Diplomatic Service. A few days
later one of the deadliest pistol shots in the German army is transferred
to Franz’s regiment. A duel is forced upon him and he is shot down in
cold blood.
Not long after the news of the duel, my tutor sent for me. “Is it not
a curious coincidence,” he began, his cold gray eyes boring into mine,
“that the last time you were here we spoke of Lieutenant Franz von
Heiden? The next time you come to see me he is dead. I understand that
certain rumors are in circulation about the way he died. Some of them may
have already come to your attention. I caution you to pay no attention
whatever to such silly statements. Remember that a Court of Honor of
an honorable regiment of the Prussian Guards has vouched for the fact
that Lieutenant von Heiden’s quarrel with Captain von Frentzen and the
unfortunate duel that followed was conducted in accordance with the
officers’ code of the Imperial Army.”
I hung my head, sick at heart; but he was relentless.
“Remember also,” he said in a pitiless voice, “that men of intelligence
never indulge in fruitless gossip, even among themselves. I hope you
understand that—by now.” He paused a moment, as if he remembered
something.
“For some time,” he went on, in the most casual way, “I have been aware
that it will be necessary for me to talk to you seriously. Now is as good
a time as any. You know that your training for your future career has
been put largely in my hands. I am responsible for your progress. The men
who have made me responsible require reports about your development. They
have not been wholly satisfied with what I was able to tell them. Your
intentions are good. You show a certain amount of natural cleverness and
adaptability, but you have also disappointed them by being impulsive and
indiscreet.
“Now,” he said, “I ask you to pay the closest attention to everything I
shall say. Your attitude must be changed if you are to go on, and some
day be of service to your government. You must learn to treat your work
as a deadly serious business—not as a romantic adventure. We were just
speaking of von Heiden. I seem to remember vaguely that the last time you
were here you had some sort of a cock-and-bull story to tell me of—what
was it?—of seeing some secret maps of French fortifications on the
unfortunate young man’s table. I could hardly refrain from smiling at the
time. Such poppycock! You do not imagine for a moment, do you, that if
he had proved himself discreet enough to be intrusted with such highly
confidential things, he would have been so imprudent as to betray that
fact to a mere casual friend of his little brother? I hope you see how
absurd such imaginings are.”
I groaned mentally as he continued.
“Remember now,” my tutor said icily, “every man in our profession is a
man who not only knows very much, but may know too much, unless he can be
trusted to keep what he knows to himself. There are three ways in which
he can fail to do that—by carelessness, by accident, and by deliberate
talking. Never talk—never be careless—never have accidents happen to
you. Then you will be safe, and in no other way can you be so safe. Keep
that in your mind. You will find it much more profitable and useful than
remembering what anybody has to say about Franz von Heiden. It was a
commonplace quarrel with Captain von Frentzen which killed him. A court
of honor has said so.”
That night at Gross Lichterfelde, after lights were out, Willi von Heiden
came creeping to my bed. I was the only intimate friend he had there
and he felt the need of talking with some one about the big brother who
had been his hero. Need I go into details of how his artless confidence
made me feel? But human beings are exceedingly selfish and self-centered
creatures. I had a heart-felt sorrow for my chum and his family in their
tragic bereavement. And, blaming myself as I did for it, I was abased
completely. Yet there was another feeling in me at least as deeply rooted
as those two emotions. It was dread.
Dread was to follow me for many years. I had learned the dangers of the
dark secret world in which I lived. Its rules of conduct and its ruthless
code had been revealed to me, not merely by precept but by example.
And with that realization all the thrill of romance and adventure
disappeared. For I knew that I, too, might at any time be counted among
the men who “knew too much.”
CHAPTER IV.
_I am sent to Geneva and learn of a plot. How there are more
ways of getting rid of a King than by blowing him up with
dynamite._
If at any time in this story of my life, I have given the impression
that accident did not play a very important part in the work of myself
and other secret agents, I have done so unintentionally. “If” has been
a big word in the history of the world; and even in my small share of
the events of the last ten years, chance has oftentimes been a more
able ally than some of the best laid of my plans. If, for instance,
I had not happened to be in Geneva in the winter of 1909-10; or if a
certain official of the Russian secret police—the _Okrana_—had not met
a well-deserved death at the hands of a committee of “Reds”; or if the
German Foreign Office had not been playing a pretty little game of
diplomacy in the Southwestern corner of Europe—why, the world to-day
would be poorer by a King, and possibly richer by another combatant in
the Great War.
And if another King had not kept a diary he might have kept his throne.
And if both he and a certain young diplomat, whose name I think it best
to forget, had not had a common weakness for pretty faces, Germany would
have lost an opportunity to gain some information that was more or less
useful to her, an actress whose name you all know would never have become
internationally famous, and this book would have lost an amusing little
comedy of coincidences.
All of which sounds like romance and is—merely the truth.
I had spent two uneventful years at Gross Lichterfelde at the time the
comedy began; two years of study in which I had acquired some knowledge
and a great weariness of routine, of hard work unpunctuated by any
element of adventure. Of late it had almost seemed as if, after all, it
was planned that I should become merely one of the vast army of officers
that Gross Lichterfelde and similar schools were yearly turning out. For
such a fate, as you can imagine, I had little liking.
Consequently I was far from displeased when one day I received a
characteristically brief note from my old tutor, asking me to call upon
him. Still more was I elated when, the next day, he informed me that I
had enough of books for the time being, and that he thought a little
practical experience would be good for me. A vacation, I might call it,
if I wished—with a trifle of detective work thrown in.
H’m. I was not so delighted with that prospect, and when the details of
the “vacation” were explained to me, I was strongly tempted to say no to
the entire proposition. But one does not say no to my old tutor. And so,
in the course of a week, I found myself spending my evenings in the _Café
de l’Europe_ in Geneva, bound on a still hunt for Russian revolutionists.
Russia, at this time, had not quite recovered from the fright she
received in 1905 and 1906, when, as you will remember, popular discontent
with the government had assumed very serious proportions. “Bloody
Sunday,” and the riots and strikes that followed it, were far in the
past now, it is true, but they were still well remembered. And although
most of the known revolutionary leaders had been disposed of in one way
or another, there were still a few of them, as well as a large number
of their followers, wandering in odd corners of Europe. These it was
thought best to get rid of; and Russian agents promptly began ferreting
them out. And Germany—always less unfriendly to the Romanoffs than has
appeared on the surface—lent a helping hand.
So it happened that on a particular night in December of 1909, I sat in
the _Café de l’Europe_, bitterly detesting the work I had in hand, yet
inconsistently wishing that something would turn up. I had no idea at the
moment of what I should do next. Chance rumor had led me to Geneva, and I
was largely depending upon chance for further developments.
They came. I had been sitting for an hour I suppose, sipping vermouth and
lazily regarding my neighbors, when the sound of a voice came to my ears.
It was the voice of a man speaking French, with the soft accent of the
Spaniard; the tone loud and unsteady and full of the boisterous emphasis
of a man in his cups. But it was the words he spoke that commanded my
attention.
“Our two comrades,” he was saying, “will soon arrive from the center in
Buenos Ayres.”
“Yes,” another voice assented—a harsher voice, this, to whose owner
French was obviously also a foreign tongue. “In the spring, we hope.”
[Illustration: The Brevet promoting Senior Captain von der Goltz to the
rank of Major of Cavalry in the Mexican Constitutionalist Army. It will
be noted that the commission bears the signature of Raul Madero and
General Villa.]
The Spaniard laughed.
“An excellent business! So simple. _Boom!_ And our dear Alfonso....”
Some element of caution must have come over him, for his voice sank so
that I could no longer hear his words. But I had heard enough to make me
assume a good deal.
Some one was to be assassinated! And that some one? It was a guess, of
course, but the name and the accent of the speaker were more than enough
to lead me to believe that the proposed victim must be King Alfonso of
Spain.
I sat there, undecided for the moment. It was really no affair of
mine. I was on another mission, and, after all, my theory was merely
a supposition. On the other hand, the situation presented interesting
possibilities—and as I happened to know, Alfonso’s seemingly pro-German
leanings and made him an object of friendly interest at that time to my
government.
I decided to look into the matter.
It had been difficult to keep from stealing a glance at my talkative
neighbors but I restrained myself. I must not turn around and yet it was
vitally necessary that I see their faces. All I could do was to hope that
they would leave before I finished my vermouth; for I had no mind to
risk my clear-headedness with more than the glass I had already had.
They did leave shortly afterward. As they passed my table I took care to
study their faces, and my intention to keep them in sight was immensely
strengthened. The Spaniard I did not know, but his companion I recognized
as a Russian—_and one of the very men I was after_.
I had been in Geneva long enough to know where I could get information
when I needed it. It was only a day or two, therefore, before I had in
my hands sufficient facts to justify me in reporting the matter to my
government.
Alfonso was in England at the time and presumably safe; for I had
gathered that no attempt would be made upon his life until he returned to
Spain. So I wrote to Berlin reporting what I had learned.
A telegram reached me next day. I was ordered to Brussels to communicate
my information to the Spanish Minister there.
Mark that: I was ordered to Brussels, although there was a Spanish
Minister in Switzerland. But my government knew that there were many
factions in Spain, and it had strong reasons to believe that the Spanish
Minister to Belgium was absolutely loyal to Alfonso. And in a situation
such as this, one takes as few chances as possible.
I followed my instructions. The Spanish Minister thanked me. He was more
than interested; and he begged me, since I had no other direct orders,
to do him the personal favor of staying a few days longer in the Belgian
capital. I did so, of course, and a day or so later received from my
government instructions to hold myself at the Spaniard’s disposal for the
time being.
That night, at the minister’s request, I met him and we discussed the
matter fully. He wished me, he said, to undertake a more thorough
investigation of the plot. I was already involved in it, and would be
working less in the dark than another. Besides, he hinted, he could not
very well employ an agent of his own government. Who knew how far the
conspiracy extended?
I was not displeased to abandon my chase of the Russian revolutionaries,
toward whom I felt some sympathy. So, as a preliminary step, I went up
to Paris, where through the good offices of one Carlos de Silva—a young
Brazilian free-thinker, who was there ostensibly as a student—I succeeded
in gaining admission into one of the fighting organizations of radicals
there. They were not so communicative as I could have wished, but by
judicious pumping I soon learned that there was an organized conspiracy
against the life of Alfonso, and that the details of the plot were in the
hands of a committee in Geneva.
Geneva, then, was my objective point. But what to do if I went there? I
knew very well that conspirators do not confide their plans to strangers.
And I dared not be too inquisitive. Obviously the only course to follow
was to employ an agent.
Now, _Cherchez la femme_ is as excellent a principle to work on when you
are choosing an accomplice, as it is when you are seeking the solution of
a crime. I therefore proceeded to seek a lady—and found her in the person
of a pretty little black-eyed “revolutionist,” who called herself Mira
Descartes, and with whom I had already had some dealings.
It is here that accident crosses the trail again. For if a certain
official of the _Okrana_ had not been murdered in Moscow three years
before, his daughter would never have conceived an intense hatred of all
revolutionary movements and I should have been without her invaluable
assistance in the adventure I am describing.
Mira Descartes! She was the kind of woman of whom people like to say that
she would have made a great actress. Actress? I do not know. But she was
an artist at dissembling. And she had beauty that turned the heads of
more than the “Reds” upon whom she spied; and a genius for hatred: a cold
hatred that cleared the brain and enabled her to give even her body to
men she despised in order the better to betray them.
I was fortunate in securing her aid, I told myself; and I did not
hesitate to use her services. (For in my profession, as must have been
apparent to you, scrupulousness must be reserved for use “in one’s
private capacity as a gentleman.”)
So Mlle. Descartes went to Geneva, and armed with my previously acquired
information and her own charms, she contrived to get into the good graces
of the committee there, and surprised me a week later by writing to Paris
that she had already contracted a liaison with the Spaniard whom I had
overheard speaking that night in the _Café de l’Europe_.
Soon I had full information about the entire plot. It was planned, I
learned, to blow up King Alfonso with a bomb upon the day of his return
to Madrid. The work was in the hands of two South Americans who were then
in Geneva.
But far more important than this was the information which Mlle.
Descartes had obtained that a high official of Spain—a member of the
Cabinet—was cognizant of the plot and had kept silent about it.
Why, I asked myself, should this official—a man who surely had no
sympathy with the aims of the revolutionists—lend his aid to them in
this plot? The reason was not hard to discover. Alfonso’s position at
the time was far from secure. His government was unpopular at home; and
the pro-Teutonic leanings of many government officials had lost him the
moral and political support of the English government and press—a fact of
considerable importance.
So it seemed possible that Alfonso’s reign might not be of long duration.
And the new government? It might be radical or conservative; pro-English
or pro-German. A man with a career did well to keep on friendly terms
with all factions. Thus, I fancied, the Cabinet Minister must have
reasoned. At any rate he said nothing of the plot.
But I went to Brussels and reported all I had learned—and did not forget
to mention the Cabinet Minister’s rumored share in the plot.
There my connection with the affair ceased. But not long after a little
tragi-comedy occurred which was a direct result of my activities. Let me
recall it to you.
On the evening of May 24, 1910, those of the people of Madrid who were
in the neighborhood of that monument which had been raised in memory of
the victims of the attempted assassination of Alfonso, four years before,
were horrified by a tragedy which they witnessed.
There was a sudden commotion in the streets, an explosion, and the
confused sound of a crowd in excitement.
What had happened? Rumor ran wild through the crowd. The King was
expected home that day—he had been assassinated. There had been an
attempted revolution. Nobody knew.
But the next day everybody knew. A bomb had burst opposite the monument—a
bomb that had been intended for the King. One man had been killed; the
man who carried the bomb. But the King had not arrived in Madrid that day
after all.
The police set to work upon the case and presently identified the dead
man as Jose Tasozelli, who recently arrived in Spain from Buenos Ayres.
It was not certain whether he had any accomplices.
And while the police worked, the King, following a secret arrangement
which had been made by the Spanish Minister at Belgium, and of which not
even the Cabinet had been informed—arrived safely and quietly in Madrid;
a day late, but alive.
What became of the Cabinet Minister? There are no autocracies now, and
not even a King may prosecute without proof. So the Minister escaped for
the time being. But it is interesting to remember that this same Minister
was assassinated, not a great while after.
* * * * *
Now there are more ways of getting rid of a king than by blowing him
up with dynamite. Foreign Offices are none too squeamish in their
methods, but they do balk at assassination, even if the proposed
victim is a particularly objectionable opponent of their plans. There
is another method which, if it be correctly followed, is every bit as
efficacious.... Again I must refer you to that excellent French proverb:
_Cherchez la femme_.
It would be difficult to estimate properly the part that women have
played in the game of foreign politics. As spies they are invaluable: for
amourous men are always garrulous. But as Enslavers of Kings they are of
even greater service to men who are interested in effecting a change of
dynasty. Even the most loyal of subjects dislikes seeing his King made
ridiculous; and in countries where the line is not too strictly drawn
between the public exchequer and the private resources of the monarch, a
discontented faction may see some connection between excessive taxes and
the jewels that a demi-mondaine wears. Revolutions have occurred for less
than that—as every Foreign Office knows.
I am not insinuating that all royal scandals are to be laid at the door
of international politics. I merely suggest that, given a king who is to
be made ridiculous in the eyes of his subjects, it is a simple matter for
an interested government to see that he is introduced to a lady who will
produce the desired effect. But no diplomat will admit this, of course.
Not, that is, until after he has “retired.”
This brings me to the second act of my comedy.
If I were drawing a map of Europe—a diplomatic map, that is,—as it was in
the years of 1908 to 1910, I should use only two colors, Germany should
be, let us say, black; England red. But the black of Germany should
extend over the surfaces of Austria, Italy and Turkey; while France and
Russia should be crimson. The rest of the continent would be of various
tints, ranging from a discordant combination of red and black, through a
pinkish gray, to an innocuous and neutral white.
In the race to secure protective alliances against the inevitable
conflict, both Germany and England were diligently attempting to color
these indeterminate territories with their own particular hue. Not least
important among the courted nations were Spain and Portugal. Both were
traditionally English in sympathy; both had shown unmistaken signs,
at least so far as the ruling classes were concerned, of transferring
their friendship to Germany. It was inevitable, therefore, that these
two countries should be the scene of a diplomatic conflict which, if not
apparent to the outsider, was fought with the utmost bitterness by both
sides.
Somehow, by good fortune rather than any other agency—Spain had managed
to avoid a positive alliance with either nation. Alfonso was inclined to
be pro-German at that time; but an adroit juggling of the factions in his
kingdom had prevented him from using his influence to the advantage of
Germany.
Portugal was in a different situation. Poorer in resources than her
neighbor, and hampered by the necessity of keeping up a colonial empire
which in size was second only to England’s, she had greater need of
the protection of one of the Powers. Traditionally—and rightly from a
standpoint of self-interest—that Power should have been England. There
were but three obstacles to the continuance of the friendship that had
existed since the Peninsular War—King Manuel, the Queen Mother and the
Church.
Germany seemed all-powerful in the Peninsula in 1908. Alfonso’s
friendship was secured, and the boy king of Portugal was completely under
the thumb of a pro-German mother and a Church which, as between Germany
and England, disliked Germany the less. England realized the situation
and in approved diplomatic fashion set about regaining her ascendancy.
But diplomacy failed. At the end of two years Berlin was more strongly
intrenched in Portugal than ever; and England knew that only heroic
measures could save her from a serious diplomatic defeat.
Then Manuel did a foolish thing. He kept a diary.
It was a commonplace diary, as you will remember if you read the parts
of it which were published some time after the revolution which
dethroned its author. The outpourings of a very undistinguished young
man—conceited, self-indulgent, petulant—it gained distinction only as the
revelation of an unkingly person’s thoughts on himself in particular and
women in multitudes. But there were portions of it—many of them never
published—which expressed unmistakably Manuel’s anti-English feeling and
his affection for Germany.
_Somehow England came into possession of the diary._
Perhaps it was the diary’s revelation of Manuel’s extreme susceptibility
to feminine charms, which suggested the next step. That I cannot tell.
In any event, not long after the diary became a matter of diplomatic
moment, Manuel paid a visit to England, ostensibly in search of a bride.
His search was unsuccessful; but in London he met and promptly became
infatuated with Mlle. Hedwig Navratil—better known as Gaby Deslys.
They chose well who selected the lovely Bohemian as the instrument of
Manuel’s downfall. Young, charming, she had all the qualities which would
appeal to Manuel’s nature. Added to that, it had been rumored that not
long before King Alfonso had shown some interest in her—and Manuel was
easily influenced by the example of his elders.
You remember the rest of the story. Manuel’s frequent visits to Paris,
where Mlle. Gaby was playing; the jewels—bought, it was said, with money
from the public treasury—which he showered upon her; these were the
subjects of countless rumors at the time. Then came reports that the lady
was domiciled in one of the royal palaces. Finally, in September of 1910,
the scandalized and tax-ridden populace of Portugal, learned that Mlle.
Deslys had been “billed” at the Apollo Theatre in Vienna as the “Mistress
of the King of Portugal.”
On October 5th, this same scandalized and tax-ridden populace joined
forces with the revolutionary party—and Manuel fled to England, where
he attended numerous musical comedies and hoped against hope that the
English Government would live up to that provision of the treaty of 1908
which pledged England to aid the Portuguese throne in the event of a
revolution.
But England—remembering the diary—wisely forgot its pledge. And a
Republican government in Portugal looked with suspicion upon the
diplomatic advances of a nation which had been too friendly towards the
exiled king—and became pro-English, as you know.
There ends my comedy. The lady in the case achieved a sudden
international fame and eventually came to America, where, I believe,
she attracted more interest than commendation. But at best, so far as
we are concerned, she is of importance merely as an illustration of how
diplomacy—or chance, if you prefer—combines politics and the woman for
its own purposes.
But there is an amusing epilogue to the affair, which was not without its
importance to the Wilhelmstrasse, and in which I had a small part. To
tell it, I must pass over several months of work of one sort or another,
until I come to the following winter—that of 1911.
I was on a real vacation this time and had selected Nice as an excellent
place in which to spend a few idle but enlivening weeks. The choice was
not a highly original one, but as it turned out, chance seemed to have
had a hand in it after all. Almost the first person I met there was a man
with whom I had been acquainted for several years, and who was destined
to have his share in the events which followed.
People who have visited Europe many times can hardly have avoided
seeing upon one occasion or another, a famous riding troupe who called
themselves the “Bishops.” They were five in number—Old Bishop, his
daughter and her husband, a man named Merrill, and two others—and their
act, which was variously known as “An Afternoon on the Bois de Boulogne,”
“An Afternoon in the Thiergarten,” etc. (depending upon the city in which
they played), was a feature of many of the famous circuses of seven or
eight years ago. At this time they were helping to pay their expenses
through the winter, by playing in a small circus which was one of the
current attractions of Nice.
I had bought horses from old Bishop in the past and knew him for a
man of unusual shrewdness, who besides being the father of a charming
and beautiful daughter, was in himself excellent company; and I was
consequently pleased to run across him and his family at a time when all
my friends seemed to be in some other quarter of the earth. We talked of
horses together and it was suggested that I might care to inspect an Arab
mare, a recent acquisition, of which the old man was immensely proud.
That evening I heard of the arrival in Nice of a young British diplomat,
an undersecretary of one of the embassies, whom, I remembered I had
once met at a hotel in Vienna. I called upon him the following day—but I
did so, not so much to renew our old acquaintance, as because that very
morning I had received a rambling letter from my chief, commenting upon
the imminent arrival of the Englishman and suggesting that I might find
him a pleasant companion during my stay on the Riviera.
More work, in other words. My chief did not waste time in encouraging
purposeless friendships. As I read the letter, it was a hint that the
Englishman had something which Berlin wanted and I was to get it.
It was not difficult to recall myself to the Undersecretary. We became
friendly, and proceeded to “do” Nice together; and in the course of
our excursions we became occasional visitors at the villa of Maharajah
Holkar, who, with his secretary (and his seraglio) lived—and still lives,
for all I know—at 56 Promenade des Anglais.
The Maharajah was at that time an engaging and eccentric old gentleman,
who had been an uncompromising opponent of the English during his youth
in India, and was now practically an exile, spending most of his time in
planning futile conspiracies against the British Government, which he
hated, and making friends with Englishmen toward whom he had no animosity
whatever. He was especially well disposed toward my diplomatic friend,
and the two spent many a riotous evening together over the chess board,
at which the Maharajah was invariably successful.
Meanwhile I made various plans and cultivated the acquaintance of the
Rajah’s secretary. He was a Bengali, who might well have stepped out of
Kipling, so far as his manner went. In character the resemblance was
not so close. I happened to know that he was paid a comfortable amount
yearly by the British Government, to keep them informed of the Rajah’s
movements; and I also happened to know that the German Government paid
him a more comfortable amount for the privilege of deciding just what the
British Government should learn. (I have often wondered whether he shared
the proceeds with the Maharajah, and whether even he knew for whom he was
really working.) The secretary, I decided, might be of use to me.
As it happened, it was the secretary who unwittingly suggested the method
by which I finally gained my object. It was he who commented upon the
diplomat’s intense interest in the Maharajah’s seraglio, giving me a
clue to the character of the Englishman, which was of distinct service.
And it was he who suggested one evening that the three of us—for the
Maharajah was ill at the time—should attend a performance of the circus
in which my friends, the Bishops, were playing.
You foresee the end, no doubt. The diplomat, with his too susceptible
nature, was infatuated by Mlle. Bishop’s beauty and skill. He wished
to meet her, and I, who obligingly confessed that I had had some
transactions with her father, undertook to secure the lady’s permission
to present him to her.
I did secure it, of course, although not without considerable opposition
on the part of all three of the family; for circus people are very
straight-laced. However, by severely straining my purse and my
imagination, I convinced them that they would be doing both a friendly
and a profitable act, by participating in the little drama that I
had planned. Eventually they consented to aid me in discomfiting the
diplomat, whom I represented as having in his possession some legal
papers that really belonged to me, although I could not prove my claim to
them.
You will pardon me if I pass over the events of the next few days, and
plunge directly into a scene which occurred one night, about a week
later, the very night in fact on which the Bishops were to close their
engagement with the little circus in which they were playing. It was in
the sitting-room of the diplomat’s suite at the hotel that the scene took
place; dinner _a deux_ was in progress—and the diplomat’s guest was Mlle.
Bishop, who had indiscreetly accepted the Englishman’s invitation.
Came a knock at the door. Mademoiselle grew pale.
“My husband,” she exclaimed.
Mademoiselle was right. It was her husband who entered—very cold, very
businesslike, and carrying a riding crop in his hand. He glanced at the
man and woman in the room.
“I suspected something of the sort,” he said, in a quiet voice. “You are
indiscreet, Madame. You do not conceal your infidelities with care.” He
took a step toward her, put paused at an exclamation from the Englishman.
“Do not fear, Monsieur—” elaborate irony was in his voice as he addressed
the diplomat—“I shall not harm you. It is with this—lady—only, that I am
concerned. She has, it appears, an inadequate conception of her wifely
duty. I must, therefore, give her a lesson.” As he spoke he tapped his
boot suggestively with his riding whip.
“My only regret,” he continued politely, “is that I must detain you as
a witness of a painful scene, and possibly cause a disturbance in your
room.”
Again he turned toward his wife, who had sat watching him, with a
terrified face. Now as he approached her she burst into tears, and ran to
where the Englishman stood.
“He is going to beat me,” she sobbed. “Help me, for Heaven’s sake. Stop
him. Give him—give him anything.”
But the Englishman did not need to be coached.
“Look here!” he cried suddenly, interposing himself between the husband
and wife. “I’ll give you fifty pounds to get out of here quietly. Good
God, man, you can’t do a thing like this, you know. It’s horrible. And
you have no cause. I give you my word you have no cause.”
He was a pitiable mixture of shame and apprehension as he spoke. But
Merrill looked at him calmly. He was quite unmoved and still polite when
he replied:
“The word of a gentleman, I suppose. No, Monsieur, it is useless to
try to bribe me. It is a great mistake, in fact. Almost—” he paused for
a moment, as if he found it difficult to continue—“almost it makes me
angry.”
He was silent for a space, but when he spoke again it was as if in
response to an idea that had come to him.
“Yes,” he continued. “It does make me angry. Nevertheless, Monsieur, I
shall accept your suggestion. Madame and I will leave quietly, and in
return you shall give us—O, not money—but something that you value very
much.”
He turned to his wife.
“Madame. You will go to Monsieur’s trunk, which is open in the corner,
and remove every article so that I can see it.”
The Englishman started. For a moment it seemed as if he would attack
Merrill, who was the smaller man, but fear of the noise held him back.
Meantime, the woman was riffling the trunk, holding up each object for
her husband’s inspection. The latter stood at the door, his eyes upon
both of the others.
“We are not interested in Monsieur’s clothing,” he said calmly. “What
else is there in the trunk? Nothing? The desk then. Only some papers?
That is a pity. Let me have them, however—all of them. And you may give
me the portfolio that lies on the bureau.”
As he took the packet, the rider turned to the diplomat, who stood as if
paralyzed, in the corner of the room.
“I do not know what is in these papers, Monsieur, but I judge from
your agitation that they are valuable. I shall take them from you as a
warning—a warning to let married women alone in the future. Also I warn
you not to try to bribe a man whom you have injured. You have made me
very angry to-night by doing so.
“Above all,” he added, “I warn you not to complain to the police about
this matter. This is not a pretty story to tell about a man in your
position—and I prepared to tell it. Good night, Monsieur.”
He did not wait to hear the Englishman’s reply.
* * * * *
That night, while the two younger members of the Bishop family sped away
on the train—to what place I do not know—and old Bishop expressed great
mystification over their disappearance, I made a little bonfire in my
grate of papers which had once been the property of the diplomat, and
which I knew would be of no interest to my government. There were a few
papers which I did not burn—a memorandum or two, and a bulky typewritten
copy of Manuel’s diary, which I found amusing reading before I took it to
Berlin.
I called upon my English friend the next day but I did not see him. He
had been taken ill, and had been obliged to leave Nice immediately. No,
it was impossible to say what the ailment was.
Ah, well, I thought, as I returned to my room, he would get over it. It
was an embarrassing loss, but not a fatal one; and doubtless he could
explain it satisfactorily at home.
I was sorry for him, I confess. But more than once that day I laughed as
I thought of the scene of last night, as Mlle. Bishop had described it to
me. An old game—but it had worked so easily.
But then, wasn’t it Solomon who complained about the lack of original
material on this globe?
The Diary? I took it to Berlin, as I have said, where it was a matter
of considerable interest. Subsequently it was published, after discreet
editing.
But at that time I was engaged upon a matter of considerably more
importance.
CHAPTER V.
_Germany displays an interest in Mexico, and aids the United
States for her own purposes. The Japanese-Mexican treaty and
its share in the downfall of Diaz._
It was in Paris that my next adventure occurred. I had gone there
following one of those agreeably indefinite conversations with my tutor
which always preceded some especial undertaking. “Why not take a rest
for a few weeks?” he would say. “You have not seen Paris in some time.
You would enjoy visiting the city again—don’t you think so?” And I would
obligingly agree with him—and in due course would receive whatever
instructions were necessary.
It may seem that such methods are needlessly cumbersome and a little too
romantic to be real; but in fact there is an excellent reason for them.
Work such as mine is governed too greatly by emergencies to admit of
definite planning beforehand. A contingency is foreseen—faintly, and
as a possibility only—and it is thought advisable to have a man on the
scene. But until that contingency develops into an assured fact, it would
be the sheerest waste of energy to give an agent definite instructions
which might have to be changed at any moment.
[Illustration: General Villa and Colonel Trinidad Rodriguez, von der
Goltz’s commanding officer.]
[Illustration: General Raul Madero, the brother of the murdered President
of Mexico.]
So I had become accustomed to receive my instructions in hints and stingy
morsels, understanding perfectly that it was part of my task to discover
for myself the exact details of the situation which confronted my
government. If I were not sufficiently astute to perceive for myself many
things which my superiors would never tell me—well, I was in the wrong
profession, and the sooner I discovered it the better.
I went to Paris in just that way and put up at the Grand Hotel. So far as
I knew I was on genuine leave of absence from all duties and I proceeded
to amuse myself. Though under no obligations to report to anyone, I did
occasionally drop around to the Quai d’Orsay—where most of the embassies
and consulates are—to chat with men I knew. One day it was suggested
to me at the Germany Embassy that I lunch alone the next day at a
certain table in the Café Americaine. “I would suggest,” said one of the
secretaries, “that you wear the black derby you have on. It is quite
becoming,”—this with an expressionless face. “I would suggest also that
you hang it on the wall behind your table, not checking it. Take note of
the precise hook upon which you hang it. It may be that there will be a
man at the next table who also will be wearing a black derby hat, which
he will hang on the hook next to yours. When you go out be careful to
take down his hat instead of your own.”
I asked no questions. I knew better. Old and well known as it is, the
“hat trick” is perennially useful. Its very simplicity makes it difficult
of detection. It is still the best means of publicly exchanging documents
between persons who must not be seen to have any connection with each
other.
I went to the Café Americaine, that cosmopolitan place on the Boulevard
des Italiens near the opera. My man had not yet come, I noticed, and I
took my time about ordering luncheon, drank a “bock” and watched the
crowd. Near by was a party of Roumanians, offensively boisterous, I
thought. An American was lunching with a dancer then prominent at the
Folies. Two Englishmen—obviously officers on leave—chatted at another
table, and in a corner, a group of French merchants heatedly discussed
some business deal. The usual scene ... almost commonplace in its variety.
Slowly I finished luncheon, and when I turned to get my hat, I saw, as
I expected, that there was another black derby beside it. I took the
stranger’s derby, and when I reached my room in the Grand Hotel I lifted
up the sweatband. There on thin paper were instructions that took my
breath away. For the time being I was to be in charge of the “Independent
Service” of the German Government in Paris—that is, the Strong Arm Squad.
This so-called “Independent Service” is an interesting organization of
cut-throats and thieves whose connection with diplomatic undertakings
is of a distinctly left-handed sort, and is, incidentally, totally
unsuspected by the members of the organization themselves. Composed of
the riff-raff of Europe—of men and women who will do anything for a
consideration and ask no questions—it is frequently useful when subtler
methods have failed and when by violence only can some particular thing
be accomplished. As an organization the “Independent Service” does not
actually exist: the name is merely a generic one applied for convenience
to the large number of people in all great cities who are available
for such work, and who, if they fail and are arrested or killed, can be
spared without risk or sorrow.
Naturally in illegal operations the trail must not lead to the embassy;
and for that reason all transactions with members of the “Service”
are carried on through a person who has no known connection with the
Government. To his accomplices the Government agent is merely a man who
has come to them with a profitable suggestion. They do not question his
motives if his cash be good.
My connection with this delightful organization necessitated a change of
personality. I went round to the Quai d’Orsay and paid a few farewell
calls to my friends there. I was going home, I said; and that afternoon
the Grand Hotel lost one guest and _Le Lapin Agile_ on the hill of
Montmartre gained a new one. Acting under instructions I had become a
social outcast myself.
The place where I had been told to stay had been a tavern for centuries.
Once it was called the _Cabaret of the Assassins_, then the _Cabaret of
the Traitor_, then _My Country Place_ and now, after fifty years, it was
_The Sprightly Rabbit_. André Gill had painted the sign of the tavern, a
rabbit which hung in the street above the entrance. After I had taken my
room—being careful to haggle long about the price, and finally securing a
reduction of fifty centimes—for one does well to appear poor at _Le Lapin
Agile_—I came down into the cabaret. It was crowded and the air was thick
and warm with tobacco smoke. Disreputable couples were sitting around
little wooden tables, drinking wretched wine from unlabeled bottles;
an occasional shout arose for “tomatoes,” a specialty of Frederic, the
proprietor, which was, in reality, a vile brew of absinthe and raspberry
syrup. There was much shouting and once or twice one of the company burst
into song.
“Tomatoes,” I told the waiter who came for my order. As he went I slipped
a franc into his hand. “I want to see _The Salmon_. Is he in?”
He nodded.
A moment later a man stood before me. I saw a short, rather thick-set
fellow, awkward but wiry, whose face bore somewhere the mark of a
forgotten Irish ancestor. He was red-haired. I did not need his words to
tell me who he was.
“I am _The Salmon_,” he said. “What do you want?”
I studied him carefully before replying, appraising him as if he were a
horse I contemplated buying. It was not tactful or altogether safe, as
_The Salmon’s_ expression plainly showed; but I wished to be sure of my
man. After a moment:
“Sit down, my friend,” I told him. “I have a business proposition to
make. M. Morel sent me to you.”
He smiled at the name. The fictitious M. Morel had put him in the way of
several excellent “business propositions.”
“It is a pleasure,” responded _The Salmon_. “What does Monsieur wish?”
I told him....
In order to make you understand the business I was on, it is necessary
that I pause here, abandoning _The Salmon_ for the moment, and recall to
your memory a few facts about the political situation as it existed in
this month of February, 1911. Europe at the time was alull—to outward
seeming. As everybody knows now the forces that later brought about the
War were then merrily at work, as indeed they had been for many years.
But outwardly, save for the ever impending certainty of trouble in the
Balkans, the world of Europe was at peace.
But in America a storm was brewing. Mexico, which for so many years had
been held at peace under the iron dictatorship of Diaz, was beginning
to develop symptoms of organized discontent. Madero had taken to the
field, and although no one at the time believed in the ultimate success
of the rebellion, it was evident that many changes might take place in
the country, which would seriously affect the interests of thousands
of European investors in Mexican enterprises. Consequently Europe was
interested.
I do not purpose here to go into the events of those last days of Diaz’s
rule. That story has already been told, many times and from various
angles. I am merely interested in the European aspects of the matter, and
particularly in the attitude of Germany.
Europe was interested, as I have said. Diaz was growing old and could
certainly not last much longer. Then change must come. Was the Golden
Age of the foreign investor, which had so long continued in Mexico, to
continue still longer? Or would it end with the death of the Dictator?
To these questions, which were having their due share of attention in
the chancellories as well as in the commercial houses of Europe, came
another, less apparent but more troublesome and more insistent than any
of these. Japan, it was rumored, although very faintly, was seeking
to add to its considerable interest in Mexico, by securing a strip of
territory on the western coast of that country—an attempt which, if
successful, would almost certainly bring about intervention by the United
States.
My government was especially interested in this movement on the part
of Japan. It knew considerably more about the plan than any save the
principals, for, as I happened to learn later on, it had carefully
encouraged the whole idea—for its own purposes. And it knew that at that
very time, the financial minister of Mexico, Jose Yves Limantour, was
conducting preliminary negotiations in Paris with representatives of
Japan, regarding the terms of a possible treaty. It knew that even then a
protocol of this treaty was being drawn up.
There was only one thing that my government wanted—a copy of the
protocol. It was that which I had been instructed to get!
The personality of Limantour is one of the most interesting of our day.
Brilliant, incorruptible, unquestionably the most able Mexican of his
generation, he had for seventeen years been closely associated with the
dictator, and for a considerable portion of that period had been second
only to Diaz in actual power. His presence in Paris at this time was
significant. He had left Mexico on the 11th of July, 1910, ostensibly
because of the poor health of his wife, although it had been reported
that a serious break had taken place between himself and Diaz. He had
spent a certain amount of time in Switzerland, and had later come to
Paris to arrange a loan of more that $100,000,000 with a group of
English, French and German bankers. But that task had been completed
in the early part of December, and in view of the unsettled conditions
in Mexico, there was no good reason for his continuing in Paris, save
one—the negotiations with Japan.
It was this man against whom I was to fight—this man who had proven
himself more than a match for some of the best brains of both continents.
The prospect was not reassuring. I knew that already several attempts
had been made by our agents to secure the protocol, with the result that
Limantour was sure to be more on his guard than he ordinarily would have
been. Yet I _must_ succeed—and it was plain that I could do so only by
violence.
Violence it should be, then; and with the assistance of my friend _The
Salmon_—to whom, you may be sure, I did not confide my real object—I
prepared a plan of campaign, which we duly presented to a group of
_The Salmon’s_ friends, who had been selected to assist us. To these
men—Apaches, every one of them—I was presented as a decayed gentleman
who for reasons of his own had found it necessary to join the forces of
_The Salmon_. I was a good fellow, _The Salmon_ assured them, and by way
of proving my friendship I had shared with him my knowledge of a good
“prospect” whom I had discovered.
“The man,” I said, “always carries lots of money and jewelry.” Of course
I did not tell them his name was Limantour. I said he always played cards
late at the club. “To stick him up,” I said, “will be the simplest thing
in the world, but we must be careful not to hurt him badly—not enough to
set the police hot on our trail.” The Apaches fell in with the proposal
enthusiastically. We would attempt it the following night.
Now the instructions which came to me under the sweatband of the
black derby in the Café Americaine informed me that every night quite
late Limantour received at the club a copy of the report of the day’s
conference with the Japanese envoy. It was prepared and delivered
to Limantour by his secretary and it was his habit to study it, upon
returning home, and plan out his line of attack for the negotiations of
the following day. I concluded that Limantour therefore would have it
(the report) on his person when he left the club.
Accordingly I had my Apaches waiting in the shadows. There were five
of us. Limantour started to walk home, as I knew he was frequently in
the habit of doing. We followed and in the first quiet street that he
ventured down, he was blackjacked. In his pockets we found a little money
and some papers, one glance of which assured me were of no value.
My carefully planned _coup_ had failed. You can imagine how I felt about
such a fiasco and how very quickly I had to think. Here was my first big
chance and I had thoroughly and hopelessly bungled it. Limantour was
already stirring. The blow he had received had purposely been made light.
If he recovered to find himself robbed merely of an insignificant sum of
money and some papers his suspicions would be aroused. I could not hope
for another chance at him. I knew that Limantour was too clever not to
sense something other than ordinary robbery in such an attack upon him.
Furthermore my Apaches had to be bluffed and deceived as thoroughly as
he was. I had promised them a victim who carried loads of money and at
the few coins they had obtained there was much growling. Luckily I had a
flash of sense. I resolved to turn the mishap to my advantage.
“We hit the wrong night, that’s all,” I muttered. “You take the coins and
get away. I am going to try to fool him.” Like rats they scurried away.
When Limantour came to he found a very solicitous young man concerned
with his welfare.
“I saw them from down the street,” I told him, “they evidently knocked
you out, but they cleared out when I came. Did they get anything from
you? Here seem to be some letters.” And from the sidewalk I picked up and
restored to him the papers I had taken from his pockets, not two minutes
before.
Limantour accepted them and I knew that my audacity had triumphed.
“They are not of very much importance,” said Limantour, “and I had only a
few francs on me.”
Then suddenly, as if he just realized that he was alive and unharmed,
Jose Limantour began to thank me for my assistance. I thought of those
who had told me he was a cold, hard distant man. Limantour flung
his arms around my neck. I was his savior! I was a very brave young
gentleman. If I had not come up so boldly and promptly to his aid, he
might have been very badly beaten, perhaps even killed. For all he knew
he owed me his life. He must thank me. He must know his preserver. Here
was his card. Might he have mine? I had been wise enough to keep some of
my old cards when I changed the rest of my personality from the Grand
Hotel to Montmartre. I gave him one of them.
“A German,” he exclaimed, “and a worthy representative of that worthy
race.” Limantour was enchanted. “And you live at the Grand Hotel?”
That was better still. I was only a sojourner in Paris and one might
venture to offer me hospitality—no? Next day he would send around a
formal invitation to come and dine at his house and meet his family. They
would be delighted to meet this brave and intrepid hero and would also
wish to thank me.
In a nearby café we had a drink and parted for the night. Next morning of
course I had to appear again at the Grand Hotel. On foot I walked away
from _Le Lapin Agile_, jumping into a taxi when I was out of sight. The
taxi took me to the _Gare du Nord_; there I doubled in my tracks and
presently, as if just having left a train, I took another taxi and was
driven with my luggage to the hotel. I dropped around that afternoon to
the Quai d’Orsay and called upon some of my acquaintances, remarking that
I had come back for a little holiday. That night I had the pleasure of
dining with Limantour.
Thereafter I had to lead a double life. By day, I was an habitue of
prominent hotels, restaurants, and clubs. I associated with young
diplomats and occasionally took a pretty girl to tea. By night I lived
in _Le Lapin Agile_ and consorted with thugs and their ilk. It cost me
sleep, but I did not begrudge that in view of the stakes. All this time I
was cultivating the acquaintance of Limantour and those around him.
Shortly afterward I succeeded in taking one of the members of his
household on a rather wild party and when his head was full of champagne
he babbled that Limantour and his family were planning to sail for Cuba
and Mexico on the following Saturday. I was also informed that on Friday,
the day before the sailing, there would be a farewell reception at one
of the embassies. Knowing Limantour’s habits of work as I did by this
time, I was able to lay my plans with as much certainty as prevails in
my profession. After weighing all the possibilities I decided to defer
my attempt on him until this last Friday night. I reasoned that he would
probably receive a draft of the agreement from his secretary at the club
late than night. He would take it home with him and go over it with
microscopic care. The next forenoon—Saturday—he would meet the Japanese
envoy just long enough to finish the matter and then he would hurry to
the steamer. Of course Limantour might have acted in a different way.
That was the chance one has to take.
Friday night came. In his luxurious limousine, Limantour and his family
went to the farewell reception of the embassy. Comparatively early, he
said his farewell—leaving Madame to go home later—and in his car he
proceeded to the club. I saw him pass through the vestibule after leaving
his chauffeur with instructions to wait. My guess as to Limantour’s
movements had been right, so the plans I had made worked smoothly.
I, too, had an automobile waiting near his club. Two of my men sauntered
over to Limantour’s car. Under pretence of sociability they invited his
chauffeur to have a drink. They led him into a little café on a side
street near by, the proprietor of which was in with the gang. Limantour’s
chauffeur had one drink and went to sleep. My men stripped him of his
livery, which one of them donned. Presently Limantour had a new chauffeur
sitting at the wheel of his limousine.
An hour later Limantour was seen hurrying out of the club. As a man will,
he scarcely noticed his chauffeur but cast a brief “home” to the man at
the wheel. His limousine started, following a route through deserted
residential streets, in one of which I had the trap ready. Half blocking
the road was a large automobile, apparently broken down. It was the
automobile in which I had been waiting outside the club. In it were four
of my Apaches. Limantour’s car was called upon to stop.
“Can you lend me a wrench?” one of my men shouted to Limantour’s false
chauffeur.
His limousine stopped. That free masonry which existed in the early
days between motorists lent itself nicely to the situation. It was
most natural for the chauffeur of Limantour’s car to get out and help
my stalled motor. Indeed, Limantour himself opened the door of the
limousine and half protruding his body, called out with the kindest
intentions.
To throw a chloroform-soaked towel over his head was the work of an
instant. In half a minute he was having dreams—which I trust were
pleasant. It was still necessary to keep my own men in the dark, to
give these thugs no inkling that this was a diplomatic job. This time
I was prepared; for I had learned of Limantour’s habits in regard to
carrying money on his person. In my right hand overcoat pocket there were
gold coins and bank notes. With the leader of the gang, I went through
Limantour’s clothes. In the darkness of that street, it was a simple
matter to seem to extract from them a double fist-full of gold pieces and
currency, which I turned over to _The Salmon_.
“Perhaps he has more bank notes,” I muttered, and I reached for the
inner pocket of his coat. There my fingers closed upon a stiff document
that made them tingle. “I’ll just grab everything and we can go over it
afterwards.” Out of Limantour’s possession into mine came pocket-book,
letters, card-case and that heavy familiar feeling paper.
Dumping the unconscious Limantour into his limousine we cranked up our
car and were off, leaving behind us at the worst, plain evidence of a
crime common enough in Paris. It was to be corroborated next morning by
the discovery of a drunken chauffeur, for we took pains to go back and
get him once more into his uniform and full of absinthe. But it did not
come to even that much scandal. Limantour, for obvious reasons, did not
report the incident to the police. The next morning it was given out
that Limantour had gone into the country and would not sail for a week.
He had had a sudden recrudescence of an old throat trouble and must rest
and undergo treatment before undertaking the voyage to Mexico—so the
specialist said. This report appeared in Paris newspapers of the day. Of
the protocol nothing was said at that time or later—by Señor Limantour.
I turned it over to the proper authorities in Berlin, and very soon
departed from Montmartre, leaving behind me a well-contented group of
Apaches, who assured me warmly that I was born for their profession. I
did not argue the question with them.
There the matter might have ended; but Germany had another card to play.
On February 27, 1911, Limantour left Paris for New York, to confer
with members of the Madero family, in order if possible to effect a
reconciliation and to end the Madero revolt. He landed in New York on
March 7th. On that very day, by an odd coincidence, as one commentator[2]
calls it, the United States mobilized 20,000 troops on the Mexican border!
It was no coincidence. The Wilhelmstrasse had read the proposed terms of
the treaty with great interest. It had noted the secret clauses which
gave Japan the lease of a coaling station, together with manoeuver
privileges in Magdalena Bay, or at some other port on the Mexican coast
which the Japanese Government might prefer. It had noted, too, that
agreement which, although not expressly stipulating that Japan and Mexico
should form an offensive and defensive alliance, implied that Japan would
see to it that Mexico was protected against aggression.
And then Germany—acting always for her own interests—forwarded the treaty
to Mexico, where it was placed in the hands of the American Ambassador,
Henry Lane Wilson.
Mr. Wilson immediately left for Washington with a photograph of portions
of the treaty. A Cabinet meeting was held. That night orders were sent
out for the mobilization of American troops, the assembling of United
States marines in Guantanamo and the patrolling of the west coast of
Mexico by warships of the United States.
Within a week Mr. Wilson held a conference in New York with Señor
Limantour. Limantour left hurriedly for Mexico City, arriving there March
20th. Conferences were held. Japan denied the existence of the treaty
and Washington recalled its war vessels and demobilized its troops.
But barely seven weeks after Limantour arrived in Mexico, Madero, the
bankrupt, with his handful of troops “captured” Ciudad Juarez. And
shortly after, Diaz, discredited and powerless, resigned from the office
he had held for a generation.
That is the story of the fall of Diaz so far as Germany was concerned
in it. There were other elements involved, of course—but this is not a
history of Mexico.
Germany had done the United States a service. It is interesting to
consider the motives for her action.
Those motives may be explained in two words: South America.
Germany, let it be understood, wants South America and has wanted it for
many years. Not as a possession—the Wilhelmstrasse is not insane—but as
a customer and an ally. Like many other nations, Germany has seen in the
countries of Latin America an invaluable market for her own goods and an
unequaled producer of raw supplies for her own manufacturers. She has
sought to control that market to the best of her abilities. But she has
also done what no other European nation has dared to do—she has attempted
to form alliances with the South American countries which, in the event
of war between the United States and Germany, would create a diversion in
Germany’s favor, and effectively tie the hands of the United States so
far as any offensive action was concerned.
There was just one stumbling block to this plan: the Monroe Doctrine.
It was patent to German diplomats that such an alliance could never
be secured unless the South American countries were roused to such a
degree of hostility against the United States that they would welcome an
opportunity to affront the government which had proclaimed that doctrine.
And Germany, casting about for a means of making trouble, had encouraged
the Japanese-Mexican alliance, hoping for intervention in Mexico and the
subsequent arousal of fear and ill-feeling toward the United States on
the part of the South American countries.
_And Germany had been so anxious for the United States to intervene in
Mexico that she had not only encouraged a treaty which would be inimical
to your interests, but had made certain that knowledge of this treaty
should come into your government’s hands by placing it there herself!_
The United States did not intervene and Germany for the moment failed.
But Germany did not give up hope. The intrigue against the United States
through Mexico had only begun.
It has not ended yet.
CHAPTER VI.
_My letter again. I go to America and become a United States
soldier. Sent to Mexico and sentenced to death there. I join
Villa’s army and gain an undeserved reputation._
I must leave Europe behind me now and go on to the period embraced in
the last five years. A private soldier in your United States Army—the
victim of an attempt at assassination in stormy Mexico—major in the
Mexican army; once again German secret agent and aide of Franz von Papen,
the German Military Attaché in Washington; prisoner under suspicion of
espionage, in a British prison, and finally your Government’s central
witness in the summer of 1916, in a case that was the sensation of its
hour—these are the roles I have been called on to play in that brief
space of time.
In the month of April, 1912, I abruptly quitted the service of my
government. The reasons which impelled me were very serious. You
remember that my active life began with the discovery of a document of
such personal and political significance that government agents followed
me all over Europe until I drove a bargain with them for it. In the
winter of 1912, by a chain of circumstances I must keep to myself, that
self-same document came again into my possession. I knew enough then, and
was ambitious enough, to determine that this time I would utilize to the
full the power which possession of it gave me. But it could not be used
in Germany. Therefore I disappeared.
There was an immediate search for me, which was most active in Russia. I
was not in Russia nor in Europe. After running over in mind all the most
unlikely places I could put myself I had found one that seemed ideal.
While they were scouring Russia for me I was making my way across
the Atlantic Ocean in the capacity of steward in the steerage of the
steamship _Kroonland_ of the Red Star Line.
[Illustration: The telegram von der Goltz received from Villa, inviting
him to go to Mexico with Dr. Rachbaum, Villa’s physician, and join the
Constitutionalist army.]
The _Kroonland_ docked in New York City in May, 1912. I left her
as abruptly as I had left a prouder service. Three days later a
sorry-looking vagabond, I had applied for enlistment in the United States
Army and had been accepted. I was sent to the recruiting camp at Fort
Slocum, and under the severe eye of a sergeant began to learn my drill.
It was toward the middle of May that I—or rather, “Frank
Wachendorf”—enlisted. After a stretch of recruit training at Fort Slocum,
I was assigned to the Nineteenth Infantry, then at Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas.
I learned my drill—shades of Gross Lichterfelde!—with extreme ease. That
is the only single thing that I was officially asked to do.
But early in my short and pleasant career as a United States soldier
something happened which gave me special occupation. My small library
was discovered. Among the volumes were Mahan’s “Sea Power” and Gibbon’s
“Decline and Fall”—not just the books one would look for among the
possessions of a country lout hardly able to stammer twenty words in
English. But the mishap turned in my favor. My captain sent for me.
“Wachendorf,” he said, “you probably have your own reasons for being
where you are. That is none of my business. But you don’t have to stay
there. If you want to go in for a commission you are welcome to my books
and to any aid I can give you.”
Thereafter life in the Nineteenth was decidedly agreeable. I set myself
sincerely and whole-heartedly at the task of winning a commission in your
army. I believe I might eventually have won it, too. But fate revealed
other plans for me when I had been an American soldier some nine months.
That winter of 1913, you remember, had been a stormy period in Mexico.
Huerta had made his coup d’etat. Francisco Madero had been deposed and
murdered. President Taft had again mobilized part of the United States
forces on the border, leaving his successor, President Wilson, to deal
with a Southern neighbor in the throes of revolution.
The Nineteenth Infantry was ordered to Galveston, Texas. And in Galveston
the agents of Berlin suddenly put their fingers on me again. It happened
in the public library. I was reading a book there one day when a man I
knew well came and sat down beside me. We will call him La Vallee—born
and bred a Frenchman, but one of Germany’s most trusted agents.
“_Wie gehts, von der Goltz?_” was his greeting.
I told him he had mistaken me for some one else. He laughed.
“What’s the use of bluffing,” he asked, “when each of us knows the other?
Just read these instructions I’m carrying.” He laid a paper before me.
La Vallee’s instructions were brief and outwardly not threatening. Find
von der Goltz, they bade him. Try to make him realize how great a wrong
he was guilty of when he deserted his country. But let him understand,
too, that his government appreciates his services and believes he acted
impulsively. If he will prove his loyalty by returning to his duty his
mistake will be blotted out.
I read carefully and asked La Vallee how I was expected to prove my
loyalty at that particular time.
“You know what it is like in Mexico now,” he said. “Our government has
heavy interests there. Your services are needed in helping to look out
for them.”
“But,” I objected, “I am a soldier in the United States Army. You are
asking me to be a deserter.”
“Germany,” said La Vallee, “has the first claim on every German. If
your duty happens to make you seem a deserter, that is all right. Frank
Wachendorf must manage to bear the disgrace. Speaking of that,” he added,
carelessly enough, but eyeing me severely, “were you not indiscreet
there? Suppose some enemy should find out that you made false statements
when you enlisted? I believe there is a penalty.”
La Vallee knew that he had me in his power. I had to yield, and was told
to report to the German Consul at Juarez, across the Rio Grande from
El Paso. So in March, 1913, Frank Robert Wachendorf, private, became a
deserter from the United States Army and a reward of $50 was offered for
his arrest.
Before I crossed the border I had one very important piece of business
to attend to, and I stopped in El Paso long enough to finish it.
Mexico, under the conditions that prevailed, was an ideal trap for me.
As the lesser of two evils I had decided to risk my body there. But I
had no mind to risk also what was to Berlin of far more value than my
body—namely, that document which, a year before, had led to my abrupt
departure from Germany and her service.
In El Paso, where I was utterly unacquainted, I had to find some friend
in whose stanchness I could put the ultimate trust. Being a Roman
Catholic, I made friends with a priest and led him into gossip about
different members of his flock. He spoke of a harnessmaker and saddler,
one E. Koglmeier, an unmarried man of about fifty, who kept a shop in
South Santa Fe Street. He was, the priest said, the most simple-minded,
simple-hearted and utterly faithful man he knew.
I lost no time in making Koglmeier’s acquaintance, on the priest’s
introduction, and we soon were on friendly terms. When I crossed the
international bridge I left behind in his safe a sealed package of
papers. He knew only that he was to speak to no one about them and was to
deliver them only to me in person or to a man who bore my written order
for them.
I reported to the German Consul in Juarez. He asked me to carry on to
Chihuahua certain reports and letters addressed to Kueck, the German
Consul there. From Chihuahua Kueck sent me on to Parral with other
documents. And a German official in Parral gave me another parcel of
papers to carry back to Kueck.
I had no sooner reached Chihuahua on the return trip than I was put
under arrest by an officer of the Federal (Huertista) forces, then in
control of the city. I asked on whose authority. On that, he said, of
Gen. Salvador Mercado. I was a spy engaged in disseminating anti-Federal
propaganda. I had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of that, and asked what
proofs he had to sustain such charges.
“The papers you are carrying,” he said then, “will be proof enough, I
think.”
Chihuahua was under martial law. I had not the slightest inkling as to
what might be in those papers I had so obligingly transported. I had put
my foot into it, as your saying goes, up to my neck, the place where a
noose fits.
They marched me up to the cuartel and into the presence of Gen. Mercado.
That was June 23, 1913, at 9 o’clock in the evening.
Gen. Salvador Mercado, then the supreme authority in Chihuahua, with
practical powers of life and death over its people, proved to be a squat,
thick, bull-necked man with a face of an Indian and the bearing of a
bully.
His first words stirred my temper to the bottom, luckily for me. If I had
confronted the man with any other emotion than raging anger I should not
be alive now.
“Your Consul will do no good,” he told me sneeringly. “He says you are
not a German. You are a Gringo. You are a bandit and a robber. You have
turned spy against us, too, I am going to make short work of you. But
first you are going to tell me all you know.”
As the completeness of the frame-up flashed upon me I went wild. There
was a chair beside me. I converted one leg into a club and started for
Mercado. The five other men in the room got the best holds upon me that
they could. By the time they had mastered me Mercado had backed away into
the furthest corner of the room.
The remainder of our interview was stormy and fruitless. It resulted in
my being taken to Chihuahua penitentiary, the strongest prison in Mexico,
and thrown into a cell. It was two months and a half before I came out
again.
There is small use going in detail into the major and minor degradations
of life in a Mexican prison. I pass over _cimex lectularius_ and the
warfare which ended with my release. There are more edifying things to
tell. For instance, how I came into possession of half a blanket and a
pair of friends.
I was confined—incommunicado, a sentry with fixed bayonet standing before
my door—in an upper tier in the officers’ wing. Confinement in the
officers’ wing carried one special privilege in which I, the desperado,
did not share. During the day the cell doors were left open and the
prisoners had the run of the corridor and galleries. My sentry’s bayonet
barred them from me, but could not keep them from talking of the new
prisoner who claimed to be a German and was suffering because he was
suspected of attachment to the Constitutionalist cause.
On my third or fourth night there I was attracted to my cell door by a
sibilant “_Oiga! Aleman!_” and something soft was thrust between the bars.
“German,” whispered a voice in Spanish out of the blackness, “it is cold
to-night. We have brought you up a blanket.”
So began my friendship with Pablo Almendaris and Rafael Castro, two young
Constitutionalist officers. Almendaris, in particular, later became a
chum of mine. He was a long, lank, solemn individual, the very image of
Don Quixote of La Mancha. I remember him with love because he was the man
who gave to me in prison, out of kindness of heart, a full half of his
single blanket.
This is how it happened. He and Rafael Castro, who were cellmates, had
contrived a way to pick their lock and roam the cell block at night,
stark naked, their brown skins blending perfectly with the dingy walls.
They had already heard the story of my plight. That night Almendaris
had cut his blanket in two, and the pair, with the bit of wool and a
bottle of tequila they had bought that day when the prison market was
open, sneaked up to the gallery and my cell. They gave the liquor to the
sentry, who, being an Indian, promptly drank the whole of it down and
became blissfully unconscious.
The blanket was the first of many gifts, and many were the chats we had
together, all with a practical purpose.
“If you ever escape or are released,” Almendaris kept telling me, “go to
Trinidad Rodriguez. He is my colonel. And if you ever get out of Mexico,
go to El Paso and hunt up Labansat. He is there.”
So they contrived to alleviate the minor evils of my predicament, and I
shall never forget them. The major difficulty was beyond their reach. The
trap had closed completely round me. The charge of spying and Mercado’s
general truculence were only cloaks for a more subtle hostility from
another quarter. The reason for my imprisonment was soon revealed openly.
I had made various attempts to communicate with Kueck, the German Consul.
Always I met the retort that Kueck himself said I was no German. At the
same time, managing to smuggle an appeal for aid to the American Consul,
I was informed that etiquette forbade his taking any steps in my behalf.
Kueck himself, he said, had told him the German Consulate was doing
all it could to protect me. It did not need a Bismarck to grasp the
implications of those contradictory statements.
After I had been in prison for about three weeks Kueck came to see me and
made the whole matter thoroughly plain.
“Von der Goltz,” he opened bluntly, “you are in a bad situation.”
“Do you think so?” I asked him, significantly.
“I have every reason to think so,” he said. “My hands are tied. I
positively can take no steps in your behalf, unless”—he looked straight
at me—“unless you restore certain documents you have no right to possess.”
They had me nicely. The surrender of my letter was the price I must pay
for my life. Acting under instructions, he had made me a definite offer.
I had to take it or leave it.
I could not give the letter up. It was my guarantee of safety. As long as
Kueck did not know where it was I was valuable to him only while alive.
Furthermore, I had some hopes of being freed by outside aid. Through
Almendaris I had learned that the Constitutionalists were attacking
Chihuahua, with good hope of taking the city. I knew that if they
succeeded, the German—whose suffering for their cause, I was told, was
known throughout their forces—would be well taken care of. So I reached
my decision.
“Herr Consul,” I said, “I will not give up the papers you refer to. I am
not a child. Those papers are in a safe place. So are instructions as
to their disposal in case of emergency. Let anything happen to me, and
within a fortnight every newspaper in the United States will be printing
the most sensational story within memory.”
On July 23, 1913, I was tried by court-martial and sentenced to death.
That led to a bitter personal quarrel between Gen. Manuel Chao, the
Constitutionalist commander attacking the city, and Mercado, who defended
it.
Chao sent in a flag of truce, absolving me from any connection with his
cause and threatening that if I were killed Mercado personally would have
to pay the score when the Constitutionalists took Chihuahua. The Indian
bully retorted that if the Constitutionalists ever captured the city they
would not find their pet alive there.
Three times in the weeks that followed, the Constitutionalist forces
seemed on the point of capturing Chihuahua. Have you ever walked out
with your own firing squad and spent an endless half hour on a chilly
morning in the company of an officer with drawn sword, five soldiers with
loaded rifles and a sergeant with the revolver destined to give you your
_coup de grace_? Three times that happened to me, at Mercado’s orders. My
profession has seldom permitted me to indulge in personal hatreds, but as
I was marched back from that third bad half hour my mind was filled with
one thought: If ever I got Mercado where he had me then I would let him
know what it felt like.
Then matters came to a crisis. Reinforcements were brought up from Mexico
City and the Constitutionalist besiegers suffered a crushing defeat. I
could put no more hope in them.
Kueck came again to see me.
“Give me an order on Koglmeier for those papers,” he demanded. “There’s
no use saying Koglmeier hasn’t got them, for I know he has.”
I could see he was not bluffing, and knew the game was up. I signed the
release for the papers. There had been no personal animosity between
Kueck and myself. I had seen too much of life to be angry with a man
simply because he was obeying his orders.
[Illustration: Constitutionalist soldiers surrounding the first cannon
captured by Villa after he was released from prison in Mexico City.]
About September 12, 1913, Kueck came to escort me out of prison, and in
his own carriage drove me to the railway station, bound north, out of
Mexico. I had a sheaf of letters, signed by Kueck, which recommended
me, as Baron von der Goltz, to the good offices of German Consular
representatives throughout the United States and requested them to supply
me with funds.
The last man who spoke to me in Chihuahua was Col. Carlos Orozco,
commander of the Sixth Battalion of Infantry, and Gen. Mercado’s
right-hand man, though his bitter enemy. His farewell was a threat. “You
are lucky to get out of Mexico,” he told me. “If you ever come back and I
see you I will have you shot at once.” My next meeting with Col. Carlos
Orozco occurred on Mexican soil.
Escorted by Consul Kueck out of Mexico I went up to El Paso, determined
to return to Mexico as soon as possible. But before I did anything else,
I felt a very great desire to square accounts with Gen. Salvador Mercado.
So I stopped off at El Paso to look for Labansat, the Constitutionalist
about whom my friend Pablo Almendaris told me while I was in prison, I
lost no time in getting into touch with him and other members of the
Constitutionalist junta.
Another acquaintance made at that time proved very useful to me later.
Dr. L. A. Raschbaum, Francisco Villa’s personal physician, was a fellow
guest at the Ollendorf Hotel.
We were an earnest but impecunious bunch. Juan T. Burns, now Mexican
Consul General in New York, may still remember a morning when he and I
found ourselves with one nickel between us and the necessity of getting
breakfast for two at an El Paso lunch counter. That lone “jitney” bought
a cup of coffee and two rolls. Each of us took a roll and we drank the
cup of coffee mutually.
I also renewed my intimacy with Koglmeier, the saddler in South Santa Fe
Street. He told me a man he did not know had come with my written order
for the papers I had left in his safe and he had turned them over.
Despairing at last of obtaining results at El Paso, I availed myself of
my consular recommendations and went out to Los Angeles, Cal. There I
received help from Geraldine Farrar, whom I had known in Germany, and in
November, 1913, directly after the battle of Tierra Blancha, Chihuahua, I
received a telegram saying: “Dr. Raschbaum’s proposition accepted; come
at once,” and signed “Francisco Villa.” My way lay open before me and I
was free to start.
I reached El Paso on November 27th and went on to Chihuahua, which had
fallen into the hands of the Constitutionalists. Once there, I looked
up my friend of the half blanket, Pablo Almendaris, and by him was
introduced to Col. Trinidad Rodriguez, commanding a cavalry brigade, who
promptly attached me to his staff, with the rank of captain.
The Federalists had retreated across the desert northward and settled
themselves in Ojinaga, the so-called Gibraltar of the Rio Grande, a
tremendously strong natural position.
Toward the middle of December we received orders to proceed to the
attack of Ojinaga. Our brigade and the troops of Gens. Panfilo Natira
and Toribio Ortega were included in the expedition, some 7,000 men. The
railway carried us seventy miles. The rest of the journey had to be
made on horseback. During four days of marching in the desert I made
acquaintance with Mexican mounted infantry, the most effective arm for
such conditions and country the world has seen.
Arriving before the outer defenses of Ojinaga, we began our siege of the
city. Soon after I got my first sight of Pancho Villa.
Of a sudden one evening, Trinidad Rodriguez told me that “Pancho” had
just arrived and we must ride over for a conference with him.
We found Villa lying on a saddle blanket in an irrigation ditch in the
company of Raul Madero, brother of the murdered President, a handful of
officers who had come up with them, and our own commanders, Natira and
Ortega.
Madero, to my mind one of the ablest Mexicans alive, was clad in the
dingiest of old gray sweaters. Villa, unkempt, unshaven and unshorn, was
begrimed and weary from his ride across the desert. But he seemed full of
bottled-up energy, and when Gen. Rodriguez and I came up he was giving
Gen. Ortega a talking to because so little had been accomplished in
regard to taking Ojinaga.
While we talked I rolled me a cigarette, and all at once he broke
off abruptly. “Give me some of that, too,” he demanded. I handed him
“the makings” and he attempted a cigarette. He was so clumsy with it
that I had to roll it for him. Then for the first and last time in my
acquaintance with him I saw Pancho Villa smoke. Contrary to the stories
that have gone out about him, he is a most abstemious man with regard to
alcohol and tobacco.
On Christmas night, 1913, happened the adventure which made me, quite by
accident, and without intention, a hero. Also, I underwent the greatest
fright of my life.
My commander, Rodriguez, had received orders to make an attack that night
straight-forward toward Ojinaga. After it was completely dark we formed
and advanced, finding ourselves very soon among the willows lining the
bank of the Rio Conchas, which we had to cross.
It was my first taste of genuine warfare, and I cannot begin to tell you
how it affected me, how ghastly it was among the willows in the vague
darkness through which the column was threading its way with the utmost
possible quietness. The beat of hoofs was muffled in the soggy ground,
and the only sound to break the utter stillness of the night was the
occasional clank of a spur or thin neigh of a horse.
Then all at once, to the front and in the distance, came a boom—the
single growling of a field-gun. Ping! Ping! Ping! broke out a volley of
rifle shots, and then with its r-r-r-r-r! a Hotchkiss machine gun got
to work. A staccato bam! bam! bam! as a Colt’s machine gun joined the
chorus. Somewhere troops were going into serious action. That was no
skirmishing.
We finally crossed the river and dismounted. Part of the brigade had gone
astray. Rodriguez cursed impatiently and incessantly under his breath
until it joined us. He was a born cavalry leader, mad for action. Any
sort of waiting lacerated his nerves.
In line, with rifles trailing, we moved across the unknown terrain of
low, rolling hills. On our front there had been no firing. Then all at
once, directly before us and not far ahead, sounded a startled “_Qui
vive?_” and an instant’s silence while the surprised outpost of the enemy
waited for an answer. “_Alerta! Alerta!_” sounded his shrill alarm.
Hell broke open around us then. Rifles, machine guns and cannon opened
fire all at once. Bullets whined above our heads and bursting shrapnel
fell around us. We had just come to an irrigation ditch, six feet wide,
with a high wire fence on the further bank of it.
“Stay here till they’re all across and look for skulkers,” Trinidad
Rodriguez gave himself time to order me, then leaped across the ditch and
began to run toward the fence. “Come on here, boys!” he shouted.
The men were quickly across. I followed, or tried to, and just as my
front foot touched the further bank the clay crumbled. Down I went into
the ditch.
When I recovered myself in that four feet of mud and water and poked my
head up over the bank the fence had been demolished. Beyond it countless
rifles spat tongues of fire toward me. But not a living soul was near.
The night had swallowed up every last one of our men.
Fright had not come yet. I was bewildered. I still had my rifle and began
to use it. After a few discharges there came a violent wrench and the
barrel parted company with the rest of the weapon. It had been shot to
pieces in my hands. I threw the stock away and got out my revolver—a Colt
.44 single-action, of the frontier model.
Boom! There was a roar like a field-gun’s and a flash that lit up the
night all round me. The wet weapon was outdoing itself in pyrotechnics,
and I was unnecessarily attracting attention to myself. So, half
swimming, half wading, I moved down the ditch in the direction of the
high hill which, looming vaguely, seemed half familiar to me.
I was lost, you understand. I had come at night into unknown terrain.
I welcomed that hill, which seemed to give me back my bearings. I
reached the base of it, got out of my ditch and began to climb, with some
caution, luckily for me. For just as I stole over the crest a roar and a
flash obliterated the night. Two enemy field-pieces had been discharged
together, almost into my face.
Deeming it more than likely that the flash had shown the gunners one
startled Teutonic face, I rolled down that hill and was once more in my
ditch. But panic had full possession of me. I climbed out on the far side
and ran among the scattered trees there until I realized that no racer
can hope to outrun a bullet. Then I stopped.
Phut! Phut! Bullets were hissing into the soft irrigated ground all round
me, for by accident I had gotten into a very dangerous zone of dropping
cross-fire, while overhead shrapnel was searching out blindly for our
horses.
By good luck I knew the trumpet calls. Whenever the signal to fire
sounded I took what cover I could, going on again in what I decided was
the direction of the Rio Conchas as soon as the bugles called “cease
firing.”
After a while I found a small gray horse standing dejectedly by a tree.
I mounted him and eventually got among the willows on the river bank.
There the horse collapsed under me without a warning quiver or groan, and
when I had wriggled myself loose and groped him over I discovered the
poor brute must have been shot as full of holes as a flute before I ever
found him.
But I had small sympathy to spend on fallen horses just then. Cleaning my
gory hands as best I could on breeches and tunic, I stumbled on through
the bushes. After a long time I came, by accident, to the place where the
brigade had dismounted to go into action. The mounts were mostly gone,
but a few still stood there, with perhaps a score of men and one officer,
Lieut. Col. Patricio, who was vastly surprised at my sudden appearance
from the direction of the front.
Our brigade had been withdrawn within twenty minutes of the beginning
of the action—as soon as it was quite certain the surprise had failed.
Patricio was waiting there because his brother had been killed and he
wanted, if possible, to take back his body.
“But,” cried the colonel, suddenly warming into emotion, “you—where have
you been? You, valiant German, refused to come back with the others! All
night, all by yourself, you have been fighting single-handed. Let me
embrace you!”
He flung his arms about me, to receive a fresh surprise. “You are all
sticky with something,” he cried. “What is it?”
“Blood,” I told him simply and truthfully. My reputation was made.
Bravado stirs a Mexican as nothing else can. Counterfeit bravado is just
as effective as any so long as the substitution is not suspected. Young
Capt. von der Goltz, in his first real engagement, had got stupidly lost
and very badly frightened. But of Capt. von der Goltz Col. Patricio and
his troopers sang the praises for days thereafter to every officer and
every peon soldier they met. He had fought on alone for hours after every
comrade left him. He had bathed himself in the blood of his enemies, up
to his hips and up to his shoulders. You could see it on his clothes.
By the time Ojinaga fell “_El Diable Aleman_”—the German Devil—had become
a tradition of the Constitutionalist Army.
Ojinaga fell at New Year’s, 1914, the Federalists retreating across the
Rio Grande into the United States. We pursued them. And on the bank of
the river I had a little adventure.
You remember that when I left Chihuahua, a released prisoner, the last
person who spoke to me was Col. Carlos Orozco, commanding the Sixth
Infantry Battalion, and his farewell was a threat.
That Sixth Battalion had been engaged in the defense of Ojinaga and
had retreated with its fellow organizations. When I came up to the Rio
Grande a small body of fugitives was in midstream. My handful of troopers
rode in, surrounded them and brought them back to Mexico. Their heroic
commander, who had offered no show of resistance, proved to be Orozco,
with the colors of his outfit wrapped round his body, under his blouse!
The provocation was too much for me. “Don Carlos,” I asked him, “is it
possible you have forgotten me? When we parted last time you promised
to shoot me if ever we met again. I am naturally all on fire to learn
whether you are thinking of keeping your promise now?”
Prominent prisoners were getting short shrift in those days, and Orozco
preserved a sullen silence. But I let him ford the river to safety. He
eventually got back to Mexico City and Huerta, by way of San Antonio,
Galveston and Vera Cruz. The story of his exploit at Ojinaga, the sole
Federal officer to come out of it alive, unwounded, and bringing his
colors with him, furnished columns of copy to _El Imparcial_ and the
other papers. Friends and admirers of his who heard the lion roar at that
time may find some interest in this less romantic record of his adventure.
I had another account to settle with my old acquaintance, Consul Kueck
of Chihuahua. During the last battle before Ojinaga an officer struck up
a rifle which he saw a peon aiming at my back. The ball whistled over my
head. The soldier later saw fit to confess the reason for his act. He
said that a big, fat German—Kueck’s secretary, he thought—had come to him
just before we left Chihuahua on our expedition and had given him 500
pesos to attempt my life.
Returning to Chihuahua very soon after New Year’s, I made it my business
to call on Consul Kueck. He had cleared out across the border to El Paso,
just before we got in.
Failing the principal, I took the liberty of arresting Kueck’s secretary
inside the sacred precincts of the Foreign Club. After my adjutant and he
and I had three or four hours’ private talk and he understood how likely
he was to occupy the cell in Chihuahua penitentiary which had once been
mine, he helped me obtain copies of certain documents in the consular
archives, particularly the letter Kueck had written the American Consul
affirming himself to be fully responsible for my safety, at the very time
when he was setting Mercado on and telling me that he could and would do
nothing for me. Once I got hold of that, I felt fairly certain that Kueck
would be moderate in his dealings with me thereafter.
Only Gen. Salvador Mercado stood wholly on the debit side of my account
book. I had heard that he had been captured on United States soil, along
with numerous other fugitive Federal officers, and had been put for
safekeeping into the detention camp at El Paso.
It chanced that Villa and Raul Madero went up to the border for a few
days of the winter race-meet at Juarez, just across the river from El
Paso. Don Raul was kind enough to invite me too, and I went along in
fettle, with a new uniform. Our army was in funds and I had all the money
I wanted.
From Juarez it was merely a matter of crossing the international bridge
to be in El Paso. I went over. I wanted to see Koglmeier, the saddler in
South Santa Fe Street, and I wanted to visit the detention camp.
I chose to see the camp first, and had the forethought to fill one of
the pockets of my overcoat with Mexican gold pieces, very welcome to my
whilom enemies. Poor fellows, they were, most of them, in the tattered
clothing they had worn when captured. Their faces were wan and meagre and
they were glad enough to accept, along with my greeting, the bits of gold
I contrived to slip into their hands.
In the center of the camp we came upon a tent more imposing than its
mates, though by no means palatial.
“This,” said my cicerone, “is the quarters of Gen. Mercado, the ranking
officer here. Do you wish to pay him your respects?”
As I have said, Salvador Mercado is squat and thick in build, with a bull
neck. Some day, I fear, he is going to die of apoplexy, if he does not
fall, more gloriously, in action. He shows certain apoplectic symptoms.
For instance, as we stepped inside his tent and he saw who one of his
visitors was, his neck swelled till it threatened to burst his collar.
“My General,” I assured him warmly, “it is indeed a pleasure and an honor
to see you again. I trust the climate up here agrees with you?” I did not
offer him a gold piece when he said good-bye.
[Illustration: Photograph of a clipping from the El Paso Herald of
December 22, 1913. No motive has ever been discovered for the crime,
other than the theory advanced by Captain von der Goltz.]
From the detention camp I went to Koglmeier’s shop in South Santa Fe
Street. Both front and rear doors were standing open, and through the
back of one I could see Koglmeier’s horse, a beast I had often ridden,
switching its tail in the yard, which was its stable. I went into the
store. “Koglmeier!” I called. “Oh, Koglmeier!”
From the side of the shop stepped out a man on whom I had never set eyes
before.
“Koglmeier ain’t here.”
“But he must be here,” I insisted. “I can see his horse out there in the
yard.”
“Yes,” said the man, “the horse is here, but Koglmeier ain’t. Nor he
won’t be. It just happens that Koglmeier’s dead.”
“When did he die?”
“The 20th of last December,” said the man. “But he didn’t die. He got
murdered.”
On the night of that 20th of December, Koglmeier, the quietest, most
inoffensive man in El Paso, had been murdered in his shop. It looked,
said my informant, “like his head had been beat in with a hatchet,
or something.” Robbery apparently had not been the motive, for his
possessions were untouched. If he had made an outcry it had not attracted
attention, perhaps because a carousel was going full blast in the vacant
lot beside his place of business. The authorities were utterly at sea,
and still are. The United States Department of Justice agents told me
they could find no motive for the murder. I knew the motive. Koglmeier
had kept “my documents” for me; therefore Imperial Germany had willed he
die.
[Illustration: This “six months’ leave of absence” granted by Gen.
Raul Madero of the Mexican Constitutionalist army to von der Goltz, is
declared by von der Goltz to have saved him from the death of a spy, when
the British captured him in London. With this document von der Goltz was
enabled to convince the London War Office that instead of being a German
spy he was a bona-fide Mexican army officer on leave of absence. At the
right is the letter of recommendation given von der Goltz by Madero at
the same time.]
Koglmeier was the only German in El Paso who was a friend of mine, and
knew of the existence of those documents which I had been forced to give
up through the agency of Mercado’s firing squads.
His end subdued the festive spirit in me and I was not sorry when we
started back for the interior of Mexico.
Torreon was taken by Villa on April 2, 1914, and we settled down there
for a brief period of rest and recuperation. Rest! Torreon stands out in
my memory as the scene of the most hectic activity I have indulged in.
Raul Madero and I have since laughed over the ludicrousness of it. But at
the time it was deadly serious. My reputation was at stake. I managed to
save it barely by the skin of its teeth.
Chief Trinidad Rodriguez got twenty machine guns down from the United
States and turned them over to me. “Train your gun crews and get the
platoons ready for field service,” he ordered. “You can have three weeks.
Then I shall need them.”
Without a word I saluted and turned on my heel. I could not very well
tell my general that I had never in my life touched even the tip of one
finger to a machine gun.
The guns arrived next day, as promised. They had been sent to us bare,
just the barrels and tripods. There were no holsters, no pack saddles
for either guns or ammunition, not one of the accessories which equip
a machine gun company for action. I had to start from the ground, in
literal truth. And I had not a soul to advise me how to begin.
We loaded the guns onto our wagons, took them over to camp and laid them
side by side in a long row down the center of an empty ware-house in
Torreon.
That satisfied me for one afternoon. I went over to Gen. Rodriguez’s
quarters.
“I’ve got the guns,” I reported.
“Good!” he cried. “I shall want the platoons ready for action in three
weeks. Not a day later.”
It was up to me to have them ready. So I got busy at once.
My first move was an abduction. There happened to be in Torreon jail
at that time a first class bank robber named Jefferson, who was being
held for the arrival of extradition papers from Texas. The day after my
guns arrived Jefferson escaped, and though the authorities made diligent
search they failed to find him. He knew more about machine guns than I
did. His profession had made him an excellent mechanic. Furthermore,
he had Yankee ingenuity and American “git up and git.” We soon had all
twenty guns set up in working order.
Then came the problem of the gun crews. Our Indians, slow, thick-headed,
stubborn and stolid, were no fit material for such highly specialized
work. Machine gun manipulation requires special qualifications in every
man concerned. Three men compose the crew. One squats behind the shield
and pulls the trigger. The second, prone, slides the clips of cartridges
into the breach. The third passes up the supply of ammunition. At any
moment the gun may heat and jam. Also, at any moment any one of the trio
may fall, yet his work must be carried on. I have seen a gunner sit on
the dying body of a comrade and coolly aim and fire, the action being so
hot there was not time to drag the wounded man aside. You cannot take an
Indian wild from the hills and in twenty-one days fit him to do such work
as that by any course of training.
My only resort was to get my gun crews ready made.
A brigade not far away from ours possessed machine gun platoons which
were the pride of its heart. I looked at them, and broke first the Tenth
and then the Eight Commandment.
To a wise old sergeant I gave a hundred pesos.
“Juan,” I told him, “get the men of those machine gun crews drunk in this
quarter of Torreon. And encourage them to be noisy.”
Juan obeyed instructions. Once the beer and mezcal took hold, the men I
wanted became boisterous enough to justify our provost guard in running
them all in. The rest was simple. The breach of discipline was condoned
by Gen. Rodriguez only on condition that the culprits were turned over to
him for further discipline.
So I got my gun crews. I was beginning to have hopes. The best saddler in
the city was making holsters. When I first approached him with an order
he had promptly thrown up his hands. “There is not a scrap of leather
left in Torreon,” he said.
I instantly thought of chair backs. In Spanish countries furniture
upholstered in old carved Cordovan leather is an heirloom. In time of
war ruthlessness is a useful quality. I soon presented my saddler with
sufficient leather for my purpose and could turn my attention to pack
saddles. Not even the sawbuck frames were procurable in Torreon, but wood
was plenty. And there was a jail filled with idle prisoners. Ten days
after the first sight of my guns I was able to report to Gen. Rodriguez
that the platoons were coming along.
“But I have no mules for them yet,” I hinted.
He sent a hundred next day, beauties, fat, strong, in the pink of
condition. But they had come straight down from the mesa. They could be
trusted to kick saddles, guns, tripods, holsters and ammunition cases
into nothing at the least provocation.
Torreon was celebrating its new Constitutionalism with daily bull
fights. Each afternoon, while the fight was on, the plaza before the
entrance to the ring was crowded with public rigs in waiting, all drawn
by sorry-looking mules, half fed and too worn out to have a single kick
left in them.
With a squad of troopers I descended on the plaza one day. No cabbie
anywhere is markedly shy or retiring, and these were hill-bred muleteros.
But we got the mules in the end.
“You are getting the best of the bargain,” I assured them. “I am only
swapping with you. In the corral I have a hundred fine, strong, new mules
worth three times as much as these played-out beasts you are getting rid
of. You can have the nice new ones to-morrow.”
If Gen. Trinidad ever guessed how thoroughly improvised his favorite
outfit was—the second in command a bank robber on enforced vacation, the
gunners kidnapped, the equipment made by forced labor from commandeered
material, and the mules snatched rudely from between the shafts of
cabs—he made no comment.
He did not live long to enjoy the fruits of my labors. In mid-June,
during the ten-day attack which resulted in the fall of Zacatecas, he was
mortally wounded.
I shall always remember that day, not only for the death of my chief, but
for a personal bit of adventure.
I was temporarily away from my guns with some riflemen in a trench. The
enemy fire was very hot and the men became exceedingly restive. Something
had to be done to steady them, for there was no cover of any sort on the
bullet-swept, shrapnel-searched plain behind us. Retreat was impossible.
There were plenty of horrors in the situation—the blazing sun, the sense
of isolation, the cries and curses of the men who were being struck. And
there was the cactus.
Unless you have been under fire of high-power rifles in a region where
the common broad-leaved cactus grows you cannot guess its nerve-shaking
possibilities. A jacketed bullet can pierce a score of leaves without
much diminution of its velocity, and as it goes through the thick, juicy
flesh, it lets out a sound like the spitting of some gigantic cat. Ten
Mauser bullets piercing cactus can make you believe a whole battalion is
concentrating its fire on your one small but precious person.
The men were getting demoralized. If they broke I was done for. If I
stayed in the trench alone the Federals would eventually get me and stand
me up to the nearest wall. If I retreated with them, nothing was gained.
No man can hope to outrun a bullet.
I stood up, exposing my body from mid-thigh upward to that withering
fire, and took out my cigarette case. The nearest men watched side-wise,
waiting to see me fall.
By some fortune I was not hit, and after a moment looked down at the man
beside me.
“Hello, Pablo!” I said, “why aren’t you smoking, too?” I offered my case
to him, but took good care to stretch out my arm quite level. To get at
the contents he had to rise to his feet.
Habit won. He did not even hesitate, and I held my cigarette, Mexican
fashion, for him to take a light. Once committed in that fashion, he was
too proud to show the white feather, and he and I smoked our cigarettes
out while the bullets flew. It was the longest cigarette, I think, I ever
smoked, but it turned the trick. We held on to that trench till darkness
put an end to the fire.
After the capture of Zacatecas I went to the staff of Gen. Raul Madero,
with the rank of Major. The invitation had been extended several times
before. Now that Trinidad was dead, there was nothing to hold me back,
and I very gladly joined the official family of the brother of the
murdered President. Since my first association with him, before Ojinaga,
he had impressed me as the ablest man I had seen south of the Rio Grande.
The closer and constant contact entailed by my becoming a member of his
staff confirmed that feeling. Raul Madero has clarity of intelligence,
an encyclopaedic grasp of Mexican affairs, social, religious, political
and financial, and a winning personality that masks abundant energy and
determination.
I was associated with him for only six weeks. On June 28th, 1914, you
remember, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated.
All through July the Austrian Government was formulating its demands
on Serbia, which culminated in the ultimatum of July 23. Long before
that I had formed my opinion as to which way the wind was to blow. And
I had a sufficiently conceited notion of my usefulness as a trained and
experienced agent to believe that when the general European disturbance
should break out my days as a soldier of fortune in Mexico would be ended.
Toward the end of July a stranger brought me credentials proving him a
messenger from Consul Kueck in El Paso.
“The Consul,” he told me, “wishes to ask you one question, and the answer
is a yes or a no. This is the question: In case your Government wished
your services again, could she expect to receive them?”
“In case of war—yes,” I answered.
It was not very long before I received a telegram from Kueck. “Come,” was
all it said.
CHAPTER VII.
_War. I re-enter the German service and am appointed aide to
Captain von Papen. The German conception of neutrality and how
to make use of it. The plot against the Welland Canal._
The meaning of Kueck’s telegram was plain. War had come at last, the war
that we had expected and prepared for during so many years. My country
was at war and I must leave whatever I was doing and return to its
service.
I went to Raul Madero with the telegram.
“It has come,” I said. “War. I shall have to go.”
We had spoken together too often, during the past few weeks, of my duty
in the event of hostilities, for any long discussion to be necessary now.
I asked for and received all that I believed to be necessary—a leave of
absence for six months with the privilege of extension. The next day,
August 3, 1914, I said good-bye to my troops and to my commander and
hastened north to El Paso.
At the Hotel el Paso del Norte, I met my former enemies, Kueck and his
stout secretary. We had dinner together and he gave me letters containing
instructions to proceed to New York and to place myself at the disposal
of Captain Franz von Papen, the German military attaché at Washington.
“When will Captain von Papen be in New York?” I asked.
“I have just received a communication from Papen,” replied Kueck, adding
with a gratified smile, “I am keeping him informed of conditions along
the border. He will be in New York two weeks from to-day.”
There was no necessity for haste then, and I remained in El Paso for five
days longer, keeping my eyes and ears open and learning, among other
things, more “facts” about Mexico than I could have acquired in Mexico
itself in a life time. “There are lies, damned lies and El Pasograms,”
some one has said. I collected enough of the last-named to cheer me on my
way to Washington and to make me marvel that Rome had ever been called
the father of lies. No wonder newspaper correspondents like to report
Mexican news from El Paso.
[Illustration: Dr. Kraske’s letter addressed to “Baron von der Goltz,”
arranging for an appointment with Captain von Papen. Translated it reads:
New York, August 21, 1914.
DEAR HERR VON DER GOLTZ:
I am very sorry not to have found you in after another
engagement. I was unable to come round and try to catch you.
I had arranged a meeting for yesterday morning between you and
a gentleman who is interested in you.
If you call on me to-morrow morning at whatever time is
convenient to you, I shall probably be able to arrange another
interview.
I am, etc.,
DR. KRASKE.]
Washington was technically on vacation at the time, but there was an
unwonted air of excitement about the city—far greater than formerly
existed when Congress was in full session. At the German Embassy I found
only a few clerks; but letters from Newport, to which the Ambassador and
his staff had gone for the summer, informed me that Captain von Papen
would meet me in New York in a fortnight. And then I learned for the
first time that it was impossible for me to reach Germany, but that I was
to be assigned to work in the United States.
I knew what that meant, of course, and I was not wholly unprepared for
it. Secret agents could be very useful in a neutral country, and I knew
from my acquaintance with German methods in Europe, that plans would
already have been made for conserving German interests in the United
States. What those plans were I did not know; but my only immediate
concern was to remove any possible suspicion from myself by doing
something that on the surface would seem to be absolutely idiotic.
I became violently and noisily pro-German. On the train I entered into
arguments (as a matter of fact I could not have escaped them if I tried)
in which I stoutly defended the invasion of Belgium and prophesied an
early victory for Germany. And when I arrived in New York I registered
at the Holland House, where my actions would be more conspicuous than
at one of the larger hotels, and proceeded to make myself as noticeable
as possible by spending a great deal more money than I could afford—and
talking. In a day or two the reporters were on my trail and I became
their obliging prey. What I told them I do not now remember in its
entirety, but newspaper clippings of the day assure me that I made many
wild and bombastic statements, promising that Paris would be captured
in a very few weeks—in a word uttering the most flagrant nonsense. The
reporters decided that I was a fool and deftly conveyed that impression
to their readers. And in a very brief time I had the satisfaction of
learning that I was everywhere regarded as a person of considerably more
loquacity than intelligence.
That was the very reputation I had attempted to get. I wanted to be
known—and widely—as a braggart, a spendthrift, a rattlebrain, for the
very excellent reason that in no other way could I so easily divert
suspicion from myself later on. I was a German, and consequently under
the surveillance of enemy secret agents, with whom—oh, believe me!—the
United States was filled. It was impossible for me to escape some
notice. Since that was the case, the safest course for me to pursue was
to comport myself in such a way that all interested persons would report
(as I afterwards learned they did report) that I was not worth watching,
since no sane government would ever employ me.
While I was engaged in achieving this enviable reputation, I had managed
to keep in touch with the Imperial German Consulate in New York, and
on August 21 I had received from the Vice-Consul, Dr. Kraske, a note
informing me that “the gentleman who is interested in you”—Captain von
Papen—“will meet you next morning at the Consulate.” That letter was to
figure two years later in the trial of Captain Hans Tauscher. I reproduce
it here. You might note that it is addressed to “Baron von der Goltz,”
although my card did not bear that title, and I had registered at the
Holland House under my Mexican military title of Major.
Upon the following morning I went to that old building at Number Eleven
Broadway. There in a little room in the offices of the Imperial German
Consulate began a series of meetings that were designed to bear fruit of
the greatest consequences to the United States—that would, had they been
successful, have made American neutrality a lie and would have perhaps
drawn the United States into a serious conflict with England, if not into
actual war.
I remember von Papen’s enthusiasm as he outlined the general program
to me. “It was merely a question of tying their hands”—that was the
burden of his statements, time and again. We could hope for nothing from
American neutrality; it was a fraud, a deception. Washington could not
see the German viewpoint at all. Everything was done to favor England.
Why, the entire country was supporting the allies—the government,
the press, the people—all of them! Nowhere was there a good word for
Germany. And that in spite of the excellent propaganda that Germany was
conducting. I remember that the failure of German propaganda was an
especially sore spot with him.
“How about the German-Americans?” I asked him upon one occasion.
He made a sound that was between a grunt and a cough.
“I am attending to them,” was his reply. I did not understand what he
meant until much later.
We talked much of American participation in the war in those days. Papen
was convinced that it would come sooner or later; and certainly upon the
side of the Entente—unless the German-Americans could be brought into
line. They were being attended to, he would repeat, but meantime it was
necessary for us to decide upon some immediate action. Of course there
was Mexico to be considered. It was too bad that Huerta had fallen. What
did I think of Villa? Could he be persuaded to cause a diversion if the
United States abandoned its neutrality?
I told him that I thought it very unlikely. “He is not very friendly
toward Germans,” I said, “and he appreciates the importance of keeping
on good terms with the United States. No, I don’t think you can reach
him—now. Later on, he may take a different attitude—when we have had a
few more victories.”
Von Papen nodded. I was probably right, he thought. We must show these
ignorant people how powerful the Germans were. It would have a great
moral effect. But that was for the future. Meantime what did I think of
this letter as a suggestion for possible immediate action?
“This letter” was from a man named Schumacher, who lived in Oregon, at
Eden Bower Farm. He had written to the Embassy, suggesting that we
secretly fit out motor boats armed with machine guns, and using Buffalo,
Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago as bases, make raids upon Canadian cities
and towns on the Great Lakes.
There were some good features to the plan—its value as a means of
terrorizing Canadians, for instance—but it was doubtful whether at that
time we could carry it out successfully. Then, too, we could not be sure
whether it was not merely a trap for us. Papen had been making inquiries
about Schumacher and was not entirely satisfied as to his good faith.
There were a number of other schemes which we considered at this time.
One was to equip reservists of the German Army, then in the United
States, and co-operating with German warships then in the Pacific Ocean
to invade Canada from the State of Washington. This plan was abandoned
because of the impossibility of securing enough artillery for our
purposes.
Another plan that we considered more carefully, involved an expedition
against Jamaica. This was a much more feasible scheme than any that had
been proposed thus far, and we spent many days over it. Jamaica was none
too well defended, and it seemed fairly probable that with an army of
ragamuffins which I could easily recruit in Mexico and Central America,
we could make a success of it. Arms were easy to secure; in fact, we had
a very well equipped arsenal in New York; and filibustering had become
so common since the outbreak of the Mexican revolution, that it would be
easy to obtain what additional material we needed without disclosing our
purpose. On the whole the idea looked promising, and matters had gone
so far that von Papen secured my appointment as captain, so that in the
event of my being captured on British soil with arms in my hand, I should
be treated as a prisoner of war.
Then just when we were making final preparations for my departure from
New York, von Papen came to me in great excitement and said he had come
upon a plan that would serve our purposes to perfection. Canada was,
after all, our principal objective; we could strike a telling blow
against it, and at the same time create consternation throughout America
by blowing up the canals which connected the Great Lakes!
“It is comparatively simple,” said von Papen. “If we blow up the locks of
these canals, the main railway lines of Canada and the principal grain
elevators will be crippled. Immediately we shall destroy one of England’s
chief sources of food supply as well as hamper the transportation of war
materials. Canada will be thrown into a panic and public opinion will
_demand_ that her troops be held for home defense. But best of all, it
will make the Canadians believe that the thousands of German reservists
and the millions of German-Americans in the United States are planning
active military operations against the Dominion.”
I looked at him in surprise. Where had he got such a plan? Papen
enlightened me with his next words.
Two men—not Germans but violently anti-English—had come to him with the
suggestion, he said. It was in a very indefinite form as yet, but the
idea was certainly worth careful consideration. He wished me to discuss
the matter with the two men at my hotel.
It did seem a good plan. As I discussed it the next evening with the two
men, whom von Papen had sent to me, it seemed entirely practicable and
immensely important. Together we went over the maps and diagrams they had
brought with them, which showed the vulnerable points of the different
canals and railways. After a number of conferences with them and with von
Papen, the plot took definite shape as a plan to blow up the Welland
Canal.
“It can be done,” I told von Papen one day, and together we discussed the
details. Finally von Papen looked up from the notes we had been examining.
“I think it will do admirably,” he said. “Will you undertake it?”
I nodded.
“Good,” said von Papen. “I shall leave the details to you—but keep me
informed of your needs and I shall see that they are taken care of.”
So began the plot which was literally to carry the war into America. My
first need was for men, and for help in getting these I appealed to von
Papen, who obligingly furnished me with a letter of introduction—made out
in the name of Bridgman H. Taylor—to Mr. Luederitz, the German Consul at
Baltimore. There were several German ships interned at that port, and we
felt that we should have no difficulty in recruiting our force from them.
Before I went to Baltimore, however, I did engage one man, Charles
Tucker, alias Tuchhaendler, who had already had some dealings with the
two men who originally proposed the scheme.
Tucker accompanied me to Baltimore, and together we paid a visit to
Consul Luederitz. The consul glanced at the letter I presented to him.
“Captain von Papen requests me to give you all the assistance you may ask
for, Major von der Goltz,” he said, intimating by the use of my name that
he had previously been informed of the enterprise. “I shall be happy to
do anything in my power. What is it you wish?”
Men, I told him, were my chief need at the moment. He said that there
should be no difficulty about securing them. There was a German ship in
the harbor at the time, and we could doubtless make use of part of the
crew and an officer, if we desired. He offered me his visiting card, on
the back of which he wrote a note of recommendation to the captain of the
ship. But while we were talking this man entered the office and we made
our preliminary arrangements there.
The following day, a Sunday, Tucker and I visited the ship and after
dinner selected our men, who were informed of their prospective duties. I
also listened to the news that was being received on board by wireless;
for the captain was still allowed to receive messages, although the
harbor authorities had forbidden him to use his apparatus for sending
purposes.
I needed nothing more in Baltimore, so far as my present plans were
concerned, but at Consul Luederitz’s suggestion, I decided to furnish
myself with a passport, made out in my _nom de guerre_ of Bridgman
Taylor. Luederitz was of the opinion that it might be useful at some
future time as a means of proving that I was an American citizen, and
accordingly we had one of the clerks make out an application, which was
duly forwarded to Washington; and on August 31st the State Department
furnished the non-existent Mr. Bridgman H. Taylor with a very comforting,
although as it turned out, a decidedly dangerous document. One other
thing I needed at the moment—a pistol, for my own was out of order. This
Mr. Luederitz provided me with, from the effects of an Austrian who had
committed suicide in Baltimore, not long before, and whose property, in
the absence of an Austrian Consulate in the city, had been turned over to
the German Consul.
The days immediately following my return to New York were filled with
preparations for our coup. I engaged three additional men to act as my
lieutenants, acquainted them with the main objects of our plan and
agreed to pay them daily while in New York, and to add a bonus when our
enterprise should succeed. These men had all been well recommended to me,
and I knew I could trust them thoroughly. One, Fritzen, who was later
captured in Los Angeles, had been a purser on a Russian ship. A second,
Busse, was a commercial agent who had lived for many years in England;
the third bore the Italian name of Covani.
Meantime I saw von Papen frequently, and had on one occasion received
from him a check for two hundred dollars, which I needed for the sailors
who were coming from Baltimore. That check, which is reproduced in this
book, was to prove a singularly disastrous piece of paper, for in order
to avoid connecting my name with that of von Papen, it was made out to
Bridgman Taylor. I cashed it through a friend, Frederick Stallforth,
whose brother, Alberto Stallforth, had been the German Consul at Parral
when I was there. He, incidentally, was later implicated in the Rintelen
trial and was detained for a time on Ellis Island, from which he was
subsequently released.
Mr. Stallforth lifted his eyebrows when he saw the name on the check. I
smiled.
“I am Bridgman Taylor,” I told him. He laughed, but said nothing, merely
getting the check cashed for me at the German Club on Central Park South,
of which he was a member.
In a few days everything was ready. My men had arrived from Baltimore,
my plans were definitely made—I needed but one thing: the explosives.
These, von Papen told me, I could obtain through Captain Hans Tauscher,
the American agent of the Krupps, which means, in effect, the German
Government.
It has been asserted many times in the last year that the charges
against Capt. Tauscher were utterly unfounded. It is easy to understand
the motives of this gentleman’s defenders. There are many people still
in this country whose friendship with the amiable captain would wear a
decidedly suspicious look were his complicity in the anti-American plots
of the first two years of the war to be proved. I shall not quarrel
with these people. But reproduced in this book are four documents, the
originals of which are in the possession of the Department of Justice,
which tell their own story to the curious and are a fair indication of
the way I secured the explosives I needed for my expedition.
These documents show:
First, that on September 5, 1914, Captain Tauscher, American
representative of the Krupps, ordered from the du Pont de Nemours Powder
Company, 300 pounds of sixty per cent. dynamite to be delivered to
bearer, “Mr. Bridgman Taylor,” and to be charged to Captain Tauscher.
Second, that on September 11th, the du Pont Company sent Captain Tauscher
a bill for the same amount of dynamite delivered to Bridgman Taylor,
New York City, on September 5th; and on September 16th, they sent him a
second bill for forty-five feet of fuse delivered to Bridgman Taylor on
September 13th—the total of the two bills amounting to $31.13.
Third, that on December 29, 1914, Tauscher sent a bill to Captain von
Papen for a total amount of $503.24. _The third item, dated September
11th, was for $31.13._
Is it difficult to tell of whom I got my explosives or who eventually
paid for them? I got the dynamite at any rate, by calling for it myself
at one of the company’s barges in a motor boat, and taking it away in
suitcases. At 146th Street and the Hudson River we left the boat, and,
carrying the explosives with us, went to the German Club, where I applied
to von Papen for automatic pistols, batteries, detonators, and wire for
exploding the dynamite. Von Papen promised them in two or three days—and
he kept his word.[3]
[Illustration: Before going to Baltimore, “Mr. Bridgeman Taylor”—Captain
von der Goltz—received this letter from Capt. von Papen. Translated it
reads:
New York, 27. VIII. 14.
I request the Consuls in Baltimore and St. Paul to give the
bearer of this letter—Mr. Bridgeman Taylor—all the assistance
he may ask for.
VON PAPEN,
Captain in the General Staff of the Army
and Military Attaché.]
Bit by bit, all this material was removed from the German Club—in
suitcases and via taxi-cab. They were exciting little rides we took
those days, and my heart was often in my mouth when our chauffeur turned
corners in approved New York fashion. But luckily there were no accidents
and in a day or so all of our materials were stored away; part of them
in my apartments—not in the Holland House, alas!—but in a cheap section
of Harlem. For von der Goltz, the spendthrift, the braggart, was seen no
longer in the gay places of New York. He had spent all his money, and
now, no longer of interest to the newspapers—or to the secret agents of
the allies—had taken a two dollar and a half room in Harlem where he
could repent his follies—and be as inconspicuous as he pleased.
So it came about that toward the middle of September we five—Fritzen,
Busse, Tucker, Covani and myself—took train for Buffalo, armed with
dynamite, automatic guns, detonators and other necessary implements,
and proceeded absolutely unmolested, to go to Buffalo. There I engaged
rooms at 198 Delaware Avenue and began to reconnoitre the ground. I made
a trip or two over the Niagara River via aëroplane, with an aviator
who unquestionably thought me mad and charged accordingly; and at the
suggestion of von Papen, I secured money for my expenses from a Buffalo
lawyer, John Ryan.
It had been decided that von Papen should let us know when the
Canadian troops were about to leave camp so that we might strike at
the psychological moment. A telegram came from him, signed with the
non-committal name of Steffens, telling me that Ryan had money and
instructions. Ryan gave me the money, as I have stated, but insisted that
he had no instructions whatever.
Then, after a stay of several days in Niagara, during which we did
nothing but exchange futile telegrams with Ryan and “Mr. Steffens”—we
learned that the first contingent of Canadian troops had left the
camp—and my men and I returned to New York, unsuccessful.
Our failure was greater than appears on the surface, for my men and
I were a blind. Our equipment, our loud talking, our aggressive
pro-Germanism—even our secret preparations, which had not been secret
enough—were intended primarily to distract attention from other and far
more dangerous activities.
We had been watched by United States Secret Service men from the very
beginning of our enterprise. During our entire stay in Buffalo and
Niagara, we had been under the surveillance of men who were merely
waiting for us to make their suspicions a certainty by some positive
attempt against the peace of the United States. We _knew_ it and wanted
it to be so.
And while they were waiting for sufficient cause to arrest us, other men,
totally unsuspected, were making their way down through Canada, intent
upon destroying _all_ of the bridges and canal locks in the lake region!
You can see what the effect would have been had our plan succeeded—Canada
crippled and terrorized—England robbed of the troops which Canada was
even then preparing to send her, but which would have been forced to
remain at home to defend the border. But far more desirable in German
eyes, the United States would have been convicted in the sight of the
world of criminal negligence. For my band of men—the obvious perpetrators
of one crime had been acting suspiciously for weeks. And yet, in spite
of that, we were at liberty. _The United States had made no effort to
apprehend us._
Good fortune saved the United States from serious international
complications at that time. While we were waiting for word from von Papen
the Canadian troops had left Valcartier Camp, and were then on their way
to England. Part of our object had been removed, and for the rest—well,
the plan would keep, we thought.
It was a disappointed von Papen whom I met on my return to New York—a
rather crest-fallen person, far different from the urbane soldier that
Washington knew in those days. We commiserated with each other upon our
failure, and talked of the better luck that we should have next time. I
did not know that there was to be no next time for me.
For it came about that Abteilung III B., the Intelligence Department of
the General Staff wished some first-hand information about conditions in
the United States and in Mexico; and I, who knew both countries (and who
was the possessor of an American passport bearing an American name) was
selected to go.
On October 3rd, 1914, Bridgman Taylor waved farewell to New York from
the deck of an Italian steamer, bound for Genoa. The curious might have
been interested to know that in Mr. Taylor’s trunk were letters of
recommendation to various German Consuls in Italy; strangely enough, they
bore the name of Horst von der Goltz within them, and the signature of
each was “von Papen.”
I had said good-bye to von Papen the night before, at the German Club. He
had asked me to turn over to him all the fire-arms I had, for use again
when needed.
We talked of the war that night, and of Germany, which I had not seen in
two years. And we spoke of the United States, and of what I was to tell
them “over there.”
“Say that they need not worry about this country,” he told me. “The
United States may still join us in the splendid fight we are making. But
if they do not it is of small moment. _And always remember that if things
look bad for us, something will happen over here._”
I left him, speculating upon the “something” that would happen; for then
I did not know of all the plans that were in my captain’s head. I was to
learn more about them later on—and I was to know a bitter disgust at the
things that men may do in the name of patriotism. But of those things I
will speak in their proper place.
CHAPTER VIII.
_I go to Germany on a false passport. Italy in the early days
of the war. I meet the Kaiser and talk to him about Mexico and
the United States._
It was peaceful sailing in those early days of the war, and our ship, the
_Duca d’Aosta_, reached Genoa with no mishap. I had but one moment of
trepidation on the voyage, for on the last day the ship was hailed by a
British cruiser. Here, I thought, was where I should put my passport to
the test, but as it happened, our ship was not searched. An officer came
alongside inquiring, among other things, if there were any Germans on
board, but he accepted the captain’s assurance that there were none—to my
great relief.
Genoa, like all the rest of the world, was in a state of great excitement
in those days. Rumors as to the possible course of the Italian Government
were flying about everywhere, and one could hear in an hour as many
conflicting statements of the Government’s intentions as he might
wish. The country was a battlefield of the propagandists at the moment.
Nearly all of the German consuls, who had been forced to leave Africa at
the declaration of war, had taken up their quarters in Italy, and were
busily disseminating pro-German literature of all sorts. I was told,
too, that the French Ambassador had already spent large sums of money
buying Italian papers, in which to present the Allied cause to the as
yet neutral people of Italy. And when I went into the office of the
Imperial German Consul General, von Nerf, I was amused to see a huge
pile of copies of—of all papers in the world!—the Berlin _Vorwaerts_,
which had been imported for distribution throughout the country. Here
was a pretty comedy! That newspaper, which during its entire existence
had been the bitterest foe of German autocracy in the Empire, had become
a propagandist sheet for its former enemy and was now being used as a
lure for the hesitating sympathies of the Italian people! In German,
French and Italian editions it was spread about the country, carrying the
message of Teutonic righteousness to the uninformed.
I found von Nerf to be a large man, with whiskers that recalled those
of Tirpitz, although without that gentleman’s temperament or embonpoint.
He assured me that Italy would never enter the war; there were too many
factions in the country which would oppose such a step.
“Why, consider,” he bade me, “we have the three most important parties
on our side. The Catholics will never consent to a break with Germany;
the business men are all our staunch partisans; and the Labor Party is
too violently opposed to war ever to consider entering it. Besides,” he
continued, “laboring men all over the world know that it is in Germany
that the Labor Party has reached its greatest strength. Why, then, should
they consider taking sides against us?”
“But do you think that there is any chance of Italy entering the war on
our side?” I asked him.
Von Nerf shrugged his shoulders. “It is doubtful,” was his reply. “What
could they do in their situation?”
I had come to von Nerf with von Papen’s letter of introduction, to ask
for assistance in reaching Germany. Accordingly he arranged for my
passage, and soon I was on a train bound for Milan and Kufstein, where I
was to change for the train to Munich. At that time the German consuls
were paying the passage of thousands of Germans who wished to leave Italy
for service in the army. The train on which I traveled was full of these
volunteers, who later disembarked at Kufstein, on the Austro-German
border, to report to the military authorities there.
At Munich we passed some wounded who were being taken from the front—the
first real glimpse of the war that I had had. There was little evidence
of any war-feeling in the Bavarian capital; restaurants were crowded, and
everyone was light-hearted and confident of victory. I saw few signs of
any hatred there, or elsewhere during my stay in Germany. All that there
was was directed against England; France was universally respected, and I
heard only expressions of regret that she was in the war.
On the train from Munich to Berlin I had the first good meal I had eaten
in several weeks. It was good to sit down to something besides miles
of spaghetti and indigestible anchovies. And the price was only two
marks—for that was long before the days of the Food Controller and $45
ham.
Berlin was filled with Austrian officers, some of them belonging to
motor batteries—the famous ’32’s—which had been built before the war in
the Krupp factories, not for Germany—for that would have occasioned
additional armaments on the part of France—but by Austria, who could
increase her strength without suspicion. The city, always martial in
appearance, had changed less than one would have expected. There, too,
the restaurants were filled; in particular the Piccadilly, which had been
rechristened the Fatherland, and was enjoying an exceptional popularity
in consequence. One was wise to go early if he wished to secure a table
there; and that fortunate person could see the dining-room filled with
happy crowds, eating and drinking, and applauding vociferously when _Die
Wacht am Rhein_ or some other patriotic air was played.
I had returned to Germany for two purposes; to fight and to bring full
details of conditions in Mexico and the United States to the War Office.
One of my first official visits was paid to the Foreign Office, where I
found every one busy with routine matters and very little concerned about
the success or failure of the German propaganda in Italy—an attitude in
marked contrast to that of the General Staff. There the first question
asked me related to conditions in Italy. This indifference of the Foreign
Office would seem, in the light of after events, to indicate a false
security on the Ministry’s part; but in reality the facts are otherwise.
Germany had never expected Italy to enter the war on the side of the
Central Powers; she did hope that her former ally would remain neutral,
and at that time was doing her utmost to keep her so, both by propaganda
and by assuring her of a supply of coal and other commodities, for which
Italy had formerly depended upon England, and which Germany now hoped
to secure for her from America. But even at the time of my visit the
indications of Italy’s future course were fairly clear—and the Foreign
Office was accepting its failure with as good grace as could be mustered
to the occasion.
But if the Foreign Office was indifferent to the attitude of Italy, it
was intensely interested in that of Turkey, which had not yet entered
the war. It seemed to me as if Mannesmann and Company, a house whose
interests in the Orient are probably more extensive than those of any
other German company, seemed almost to have taken possession of the
Colonial Office, so many of its employees were in evidence there: and
I had an extended conference with Bergswerkdirektor Steinmann, who had
formerly been in charge of the Asia Minor interests of this company.
Mexico, of course, was the principal topic of our conversation, but many
times he spoke of Turkey and of the small doubt that existed as to her
future course of action.
[Illustration: Captain Tauscher’s order upon the du Pont de Nemours
Powder Company for explosives to be delivered to “Bridgeman Taylor” and
a bill for “merchandise” charged to Captain von Papen. The third item on
Tauscher’s bill corresponds with the amount of the two bills shown in the
preceding illustrations. The four photographs indicate how von der Goltz
secured ammunition for the Welland Canal Enterprise.]
Next door to the Foreign Office, every corner of which was a-hum with
busy clerks and officials, stood the house to which I had been taken
from Gross Lichterfelde so many years before—“Samuel Mayer’s Bude.” It
was very quiet and empty to outward appearance; and yet from within that
silent, deserted house, I think it safe to say, the destiny of Europe was
being directed. It was there that the Kaiser spent his days, when he was
in Berlin. And it was there that the Imperial Chancellor had his office
and determined more than any man except the Kaiser, the policies of the
Empire.
One entered the house, going directly into a large room that was occupied
no longer by the round-faced man of my cadet days, but by Assessor
Horstman, the head of the Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.
Upstairs was the private office of the Emperor, and, to the rear of that,
the Nachrichten Bureau—a newspaper propaganda and intelligence office,
directed by the Kaiser and under the charge of Legation-Secretary Weber.
I visited the Turkish Legation, at the suggestion of Herr Steinmann, and
discussed at length and very seriously with the Ambassador the attitude
of Italy and its effect upon Turkey’s possible entry into the war. He
assured me that the only thing necessary to make Turkey take part in the
conflict was a guarantee that Germany was capable of handling the Italian
situation, and that whatever Italy might do would not affect Turkish
interests.
But it was with the General Staff that my chief business was. At the
outbreak of hostilities this—the “War Office” so-called—had become two
organizations. One, devoted to the actual supervision of the forces in
the field, had its headquarters in Charleville, France, far behind the
battle front; the other branch remained in the dingy old building on the
Koenig’s Platz, in which it had always been quartered. It is here that
the army department of “Intelligence,” officially known as Abteilung III
B., is located, and it was to this department that I had been assigned.
[Illustration: Bills from the du Pont de Nemours Powder Company for
explosives delivered to “Bridgeman Taylor” and charged to Captain
Tauscher.]
Von Papen had, of course, communicated to Berlin an account of our
various activities and there was little that I could add to the
information the department possessed about conditions in the United
States. Mexico seemed rather the chief point of interest, and Major
Köhnemann, to whom I spoke, asked innumerable questions about the
attitude of Villa towards both the United States and Germany; what I
thought of his chances of ultimate success, and whether I believed that
he, if he succeeded, would be more friendly to Germany than Carranza
was at the time. After an hour of such discussion, which more closely
resembled a cross-examination, he suddenly rose.
“Your information is of great interest, Captain von der Goltz,” he said.
“I shall ask you to return here at five o’clock this evening. Wear your
heaviest underclothing. You are going to see the Emperor.”
I started. Prussian officers do not joke, as a rule, but for the life of
me, I could not see any sane connection between his last two remarks. The
major must have noticed my perplexity, for he smiled as he continued.
“You are going to travel by Zeppelin,” he explained. “It will be very
cold.”
That night I drove by motor to a point on the outskirts of the city,
where a Zeppelin was moored. It was one of those which had formerly
been fitted up for passenger service, and was now used when quick
transportation of a small number of men was necessary. There were several
officers of the General Staff whose immediate presence at Coblenz, where
the Emperor had stationed himself, was needed; and since speed was
essential we were to travel this way.
The miles that lay between Berlin and Coblenz seemed but so many rods to
me, as I sat in the salon of the great airship, resting and talking to my
fellow passengers. One would have thought that we had been traveling but
a few moments when suddenly there loomed below us in the moonlight, the
twin fortresses of Ehrenbreitstein and Coblenz, each built upon a high
plateau. Between them, in the valley, the lights of the city shone dimly;
in the center of the town was the Schloss, where the Emperor awaited us.
But I did not see the Emperor that night. Instead, I was shown to a room
in the castle—a room lighted by candle—and there my attendant bade me
goodnight.
At half-past three I was awakened by a knock at the door. “Please dress,”
said a voice. “His Majesty wishes to see you at four o’clock.”
It was still dark when at four o’clock I entered that room on the ground
floor of the castle where the Emperor of Emperors worked and ate and
slept. In the dim light I saw him, bent over a table on which was piled
correspondence of all kinds. He did not seem to have heard me enter the
room, and as he continued to work, signing paper after paper with great
rapidity, I looked down and noticed that, in my haste to appear before
him on time, I had dressed completely save for one thing. I was in my
stocking feet.
I coughed to announce my presence. He looked up then, and I saw that he
wore a Litewka, that undress military jacket which is used by soldiers
for stable duty, and which German officers wear sometimes in their homes.
But the face that met mine, startled me almost out of my composure; for
it was more like the countenance of Pancho Villa than that of Wilhelm
Hohenzollern. That face, as a rule so majestic in its expression, was
drawn and lined; his hair was disarranged and showed numerous bald
patches which it ordinarily covered. And his moustaches—for so many years
the target of friend and foe and which were always pointed so arrogantly
upward—drooped down and gave him a dispirited look that I had never seen
him wear before.
In a word, it was an extremely nervous and not a stolid, Teutonic person
who sat before me in that room. And it was not an assertive, but merely
a very tired human being, who finally addressed me.
“I am sorry to have been obliged to call you at this hour,” he said, “but
I am very busy and it is important that I should see you.”
And then instead of ordering me to report to him, instead of commanding
me to tell him those things which I had been sent to tell him, this
autocrat, this so-called man of iron, spoke to me as one man to another,
almost as a friend speaks to a friend.
I do not remember all that we spoke of in that half hour—the three years
that have passed have brought me too much of experience for me to recall
clearly more than the general tenor of our conversation. It is his manner
that I remember most vividly, and the general impression of the scene.
For as I stood before him then, it suddenly seemed to me that he spoke
and looked as a man will who is confronted by a problem that for the
moment has staggered him—not because of its immensity but because he sees
now that he has always misunderstood it.
Here, I thought, is a man, accustomed to facing all issues with grand
words and a show of arrogance; and now at a time when oratory is of
no avail, he finds himself still indomitable, perhaps, but a trifle
lost, a trifle baffled, when he contemplates the work before him. For
Wilhelm II had labored for years to prevent, or if that were impossible,
to come victoriously through, the crisis which he knew must some day
develop, and which he himself had at last precipitated. He had striven
constantly to entrench Germany in a position that would command the
world; and had sought to concentrate, so far as may be, the trouble
spots of the world into one or two, to the end that Germany, when the
time came, might extinguish them at a blow. But the time had come, and
he knew that despite his efforts, there were not two but many issues
that must be faced, and each one separately. He had striven with a sort
of perverted altruism, to prepare the world for those things which he
believed to be right and which, therefore, must prevail. And now after
long years of preparation, of diplomatic intrigue with its record of
nations bribed, threatened or cajoled into submission or alliance, he
was faced with a condition which gave the lie to his expectations and
he knew that “failure” must be written across the years. Russia, Japan,
were for the moment lost; Italy was making ready to cast itself loose
from that alliance which had been so insecurely founded upon distrust.
And in America—who could tell? And yet, for all that I read weariness
and bewilderment in his every tone, I could find in him no trace of
hesitation or uncertainty. Instead, I knew that running through every
fibre of the man there was an unquestioning assurance of victory—a
victory that must come!
While I stood there imagining these things, he spoke of our aims in
Europe and in America and of the things that must be done to bring them
to success. He bade me tell him the various details of our affairs
in Mexico and the United States; and he, like Köhnemann, was chiefly
interested in Mexico. It was in fact, almost suspicious, his interest was
so great; and I could explain it only in one way—that he viewed Mexico as
the ultimate battlefield of Japan and the United States in the next great
struggle—the struggle for the mastery of the Pacific. For just as Belgium
has been the battlefield of Europe, so must Mexico be the battleground of
America in that war which the future seems to be preparing.
I remember wondering, as he spoke of what might come to pass, at the
tremendous familiarity he displayed with the points of view of the
peoples and governments of both Americas. I had thought myself well
acquainted with conditions in both continents; but here was a man
separated by thousands of miles from the peoples of whom he talked, whose
knowledge was, nevertheless, more correct, as I saw it, than that of
anyone—Dernburg not excepted—whom I had met.
It was then, I think, that he told me what Germany wished of me,
outlining briefly those things which he thought I could do best.
“You can serve us,” he said, “in Turkey or in America. In the one you
will have an opportunity to fight as thousands of your countrymen are
fighting. In the other, you will have chosen a task that is not so
pleasant perhaps, and not less dangerous, but which will always be
regarded honorably by your Emperor, because it is work that must be done.
Which do you choose?”
I hesitated a moment.
“It shall be as your Majesty wishes,” I said finally.
He looked at me closely before he spoke again. “It is America, then.”
And then, as I bowed in acquiescence, he spoke once more—for the last
time so far as my ears are concerned.
“I must be ready by 7; my train leaves at 7.10. I may never see you
again, but I shall always know that you have done your duty. Good-bye.”
And so I left him—this man who is a menace to his people, not because
he is vicious or from any criminal intent; not, I believe, because his
personal ambitions are such that his country must bleed to satisfy them;
but merely because his mind is the outcome of a system and an education
so divorced from fact that he could not see the evil of his own position
if it were explained to him.
For in spite of his remarkable grasp of the facts of Empire, the deeper
human realities have passed him by. For years he has had a private
clipping bureau for his own information; but he does not know that he
has never seen any but the clippings that the Junkers—those who stood
to gain by the success of his present course—have wished him to see. He
does not know that he has been shut out from many chapters of the world’s
real history; or that this insidious censorship has kept from him those
things, which, I am sure, had he known in the days when his intellect was
susceptible to the influence of fact, would have made him a man instead
of an Emperor.
Here was a man who honestly believed that he was doing what was best
for his people, but so hopelessly warped by his training and so closely
surrounded by satellites that even had the truth borne wings, it could
not have reached him.
To me it seems that the menace of the Hohenzollerns lies in this: not
that they are worse than other men, not that they mean ill to the world,
but that time and experience have left them unaroused by what others know
as progress. They stand in the pathway of the world to-day, believing
themselves right and regarding themselves as victims of an oppressive
rivalry. They do not know that their viewpoint is as tragically perverted
as that of the fox who, feeling that he must live, steals the farmer’s
hens. But, like the farmer, the world knows only that it is injured; and
just as the farmer realizes that he must rid himself of the fox, so the
world knows, to-day, and says that the Hohenzollerns must go!
CHAPTER IX.
_In England—and how I reached there. I am arrested and
imprisoned for fifteen months. What von Papen’s baggage
contained. I make a sworn statement._
Back in Berlin, I sought out Major Köhnemann, and together we spent many
days in planning my future course of action. It was a war council in
effect, for the object toward which we aimed was nothing less than the
crippling of the United States by a campaign of terrorism and conspiracy.
It was not pleasant work that I was to do, but I knew, as every informed
German did, that it was necessary. Therefore I accepted it.
What would you have? Germany was in the war to conquer or be conquered.
America, the source of supply for the Allies, stood in the way. Knowing
these things, we set about the task of preventing America from aiding
our enemies, by using whatever means we could. We did not feel either
compunction or hostility. It was war—diplomatic rather than military,
but war none the less.
I do not intend to go into the details of our plans at the present
moment. Those will have their place in a later chapter. Enough to say
that after a brief visit to both the eastern and western fronts I
left Germany for England—en route to America with a program that in
ruthlessness or efficiency left nothing to be desired.
But before going to England it was necessary that I take every possible
precaution against exposure there. My passport might be sufficient
identification, but I knew that since the arrest of Carl Lody and
other German spies in England, the British authorities were examining
passports with a great deal more care than they had formerly exercised.
Accordingly, one morning, Mr. Bridgman Taylor presented himself at the
American Embassy for financial aid with which to leave Germany. There was
good reason for this. To ask a consulate or embassy to visé a passport
when that is not necessary, may easily seem suspicious. But the applicant
for aid, receives not only additional identification in the form of
a record of his movements, but also secures an advantage in that his
passport bears an indorsement of his appeal for assistance, in my case
signed with the name of the Ambassador. At The Hague I again applied for
help from the United States Relief Commission. I amused myself on this
occasion by making two drafts; one for fifteen dollars on Mr. John F.
Ryan of Buffalo, N. Y., and one for thirty dollars on “Mr. Papen” of New
York City.
I was fairly secure, then, I thought. If suspicion did fall upon me, it
would be simple to prove that I had submitted my passport to a number of
American officials, and had consequently satisfied them of my good faith
as well as that the passport had not been issued to some one other than
myself, as in the case of Lody.
As a final step I took care to divide my personal papers into two groups:
those which were perfectly harmless, such as my Mexican commission and
leave of absence, and those which would tend to establish my identity as
a German agent. These I deposited in two separate safe-deposit vaults in
Rotterdam, taking care to remember in which each group was placed—and
that done, with a feeling of personal security, and even a certain amount
of zest for the adventure, I boarded a channel steamer for England.
I was absolutely safe, I felt. In my confidence, I went about very
freely, ignoring the fact that England was at the moment in the throes
of a spy-scare, and even so well-recommended a German-American as Mr.
Bridgman Taylor, was not likely to escape scrutiny.
And yet, I believe that I should not have been caught at all, if I had
not stopped one day in front of the Horse Guards and joined the crowd
that was watching guard mount. Why I did it, it is impossible for me to
say. There was no military advantage to be gained; that is certain. And
I had seen guard mount often enough to find no element of novelty in it.
Whim, I suppose, drew me there; and as luck would have it, it drew into
a particularly congested portion of the crowd. And then chance played
another card, by causing a small boy to step on my foot. I lost my temper
and abused the lad roundly for his carelessness—so roundly in fact that a
man standing in front of me turned around and looked into my face.
I recognized him at once as an agent of the Russian Government, whom I
had once been instrumental in exposing as a spy in Germany. I saw him
look at me closely for a moment and I could tell by his expression,
although he said no word, that he had recognized me also. Thrusting
a penny into the boy’s hand, I made haste to get out of the crowd as
quickly as I could.
Here was a pleasant situation, I thought, as I made my way very quietly
to my hotel. I could not doubt that the Russian would report me—but what
then? His word against mine would not convict me of anything, but it
might lead to an inconvenient period of detention. I sat down to consider
the situation.
After all, I decided, the situation was serious but not absolutely
hopeless. Unquestionably I should be reported to the police;
unquestionably a careful investigation would result in the discovery
that there was no Bridgman H. Taylor at the address in El Paso which I
had given to the Relief Commission at the Hague. For the rest, my accent
would prove only that I was of German blood; not that I was a German
subject.
So far, so bad. But what then? I had, in the safe deposit vaults at
Rotterdam, papers proving that I was a Mexican officer on leave. It would
be a simple matter to send for these papers, to admit that I was Horst
von der Goltz, and to state that I was in England _en route_ from a visit
to my family in Germany and now bound for Mexico to resume my services.
There remained but one matter to explain: why I was using an American
passport bearing a name that was not mine.
That should not be a difficult task. Huerta had been overthrown barely
a week before my leave of absence was issued. Carranza’s government had
not yet been recognized, and already my general, Villa, had quarreled
with him, so that it was impossible for me to procure a passport from
the Mexican Government. In my dilemma, I had taken advantage of the
offer of an American exporter, who had been kind enough to lend me his
passport, which he had secured and found he did not need at the time. As
for my name, it was not a particularly good one under which to travel in
England, so I had naturally been obliged to use the one on my passport.
It was a good story and had somewhat the appearance of truth. The
question was, would it be believed? Even if it were, it had its
disadvantages; for I should certainly be arrested as an enemy alien, and
after a delay fatal to all my plans, I should probably be deported. I
decided to try a bolder scheme.
In Parliamentary White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 13, (1916), you will find
a statement which explains my next step. “Horst von der Goltz,” it says,
“arrived in England from Holland on the fourth of November, 1914. He
offered information upon projected air raids, the source whence the Emden
derived her information as to British shipping, and how the Leipsic was
obtaining her coal supply. _He offered to go back to Germany to obtain
information and all he asked for in the first instance was his traveling
expenses._”
What is the meaning of these amazing statements? Simply this. I realized
that even if the story I had concocted were believed it would mean
a considerable delay and ultimate deportation. And as I had no mind
to submit to either of these things if I could avoid them, I decided
to forestall my Russian friend by taking the only possible step—one
commendable for its audacity if for nothing else. Accordingly I walked
straight to Downing Street and into the Foreign Office. I asked to see
Mr. Campbell of the Secret Intelligence Department. This was walking into
the jaws of the lion with a vengeance.
I told Mr. Campbell that I wished to enter the British Secret Service;
that I was in a position to secure much valuable information.
“Upon what subject?” asked Mr. Campbell.
[Illustration: The check which almost cost von der Goltz his life. It was
this “Scrap of Paper” which was found among von Papen’s effects and which
enabled the British authorities to prove von der Goltz’s connection with
the German Government. In the British White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6
(1916) is to be found this comment:
Mr. Bridgeman Taylor: This person came over to England to offer
himself for work under His Majesty’s Government. His real name
is von der Goltz, and he is now in England.]
Zeppelin raids, I told him. I choose that subject first, because it was
the least harmful I could think of in case my “traitorous” offer ever
reached the ears of Berlin. No one knew better than I how impossible it
was to obtain information about Zeppelins. I reasoned that the officers
in command of Abteilung III B in the General Staff would know that I
was bluffing when I offered to get information upon that subject for
the English. They would know that I was not in a position to have or to
obtain any such knowledge, for in Germany no topic is so closely guarded
as that. Also, I reasoned that it was a topic in which the English were
vastly interested. They were.
Mr. Campbell was hesitating, so I added two other equally absurd
subjects, the movements of the _Emden_ and the _Leipsic_, about which I
knew—and the service chiefs knew that I knew—absolutely nothing.
Mr. Campbell was plainly puzzled. My intentions seemed to be good. At any
rate, I had come to him quite openly, and any ulterior motives I might
have had were not apparent. Then, too, I had offered him the key of my
safe deposit box, telling him what it contained. He considered a moment.
“We shall have to investigate your story,” he said finally. “We shall
send to Holland for the papers you say are contained in the vault there;
and you will be questioned further. In the meantime I shall have to place
you under arrest.”
I had expected nothing better than this, and went to my jail with a
feeling that was relief rather than anything else. My papers would
establish my identity and then, if all went well, I should go back to
Germany and make my way to America by another route.
But all did not go well. Somehow, in spite of my commission and leave of
absence—perhaps because my offer seemed too good to be true—the British
authorities decided that it would be better to lose the information I
had offered them and keep me in England. Whatever their suspicions, the
only charge they could bring against me and prove was that I was an
alien enemy who had failed to register. They had no proof whatever of
any connection between me and the German Government. So on the 13th of
November, 1914, they brought me into a London police court to answer
the charge of failing to register. I was delighted to do so. It was far
more comfortable than facing a court martial on trial for my life as
a spy, as the English newspapers had seemed to expect. Accordingly on
the 26th of November I was duly sentenced to six months at hard labor
in Pentonville Prison, with a recommendation for deportation at the
expiration of my sentence. I served five months at Pentonville—where
Roger Casement was hanged—and then my good behavior let me out. Home
Secretary MacKenna signed the order for my deportation. I was free. I was
to slip from under the paw of the lion.
And then something happened—to this day I don’t know what. Instead of
being deported I was thrust into Brixton Prison, where Kuepferer hanged
himself, strangely enough, just after his troubles seemed over. Kuepferer
had driven a bargain with the English. He was to give them information
in return for his life and freedom; and then, when he had everything
arranged, he committed suicide. In Brixton I was not sentenced on any
charge, I was simply held in solitary confinement, with occasional
diversions in the form of a “third degree.” After my first insincere
offer to give the English information I kept my mouth shut and made no
overtures to them, although I confess that the temptation to tell all
I knew was often very great. The English got nothing out of me and in
September, 1915, I was shifted to another prison. They took me out of
Brixton and placed me into Reading—the locale of Oscar Wilde’s ballad.
Conditions were less disagreeable there. I was allowed to have newspapers
and magazines, and to talk and exercise with my fellow prisoners.
You may be sure that all this time the English made attempts to solve my
personal identity as well as to learn the reason for my being in England.
They could not shake my story. Time after time I told them: “I am Horst
von der Goltz, an officer of the Mexican army on leave. I used the United
States passport made out to Bridgman Taylor from necessity—to avoid the
suspicion that would be attached to me because of my German descent.
“Gentlemen, that is all I can tell you.”
Over and over again I repeated that meagre statement to the men who
questioned me. I would not tell them the truth, and I knew that no lie
would help me. And then came an event which changed my viewpoint and made
me tell—if not the whole story—at least a considerable part of it.
I had, as I have said, managed to secure newspapers in my new quarters.
It is difficult to say how eagerly I read them after so many months of
complete ignorance, or with what anxiety I studied such war news as came
into my hands. It was America in which I was chiefly interested, for I
knew that after my capture, some other man must have been sent to do the
work which I had planned to do. I know now that it was von Rintelen who
was selected—that infinitely resourceful intriguer who planted his spies
throughout the United States, and for a time seemed well on the way to
succeeding in the most gigantic conspiracy against a peaceful nation
that had ever been undertaken. But at the time I could tell nothing of
this, although I watched unceasingly for reports of strikes, explosions
and German uprisings which would tell me that that work which I had been
commanded to do and from which I was only too glad to be spared, was
being prosecuted.
So several months passed—months in which I had time for meditation and in
which I began to see more clearly some things which had been hinted at in
Berlin—and of which I shall tell more later on. And then one day I read a
dispatch that caused me to sit very silently for a moment in my cell, and
to wonder—and fear a little.
Von Papen had been recalled.
I read the story of how he and Captain Boy-Ed had over-reached and
finally betrayed themselves; of the passport frauds that they had
conducted; of the conspiracies and sedition that they had sought to stir
up. I learned that they had been sent home under a safe-conduct which did
not cover any documents they might carry. It was this last fact which
caused me uneasiness. Had von Papen, always so confident of his success,
attempted to smuggle through some report of his two years of plotting? It
seemed improbable, and yet, knowing his tendency to take chances, I was
troubled by the possibility. For such a report might contain a record of
my connection with him—and I was not protected by a safe-conduct!
My fears were well-founded, as you know. Von Papen carried with him no
particular reports, but a number of personal papers which were seized
when his ship stopped at Falmouth.
In my prison I read of the seizure and was doubly alarmed; increasingly
so when the newspapers began publishing reports that they implicated
literally hundreds of Irish- and German-Americans whose services von
Papen had used in his plots. Then as the days passed, and my name was
not mentioned in the disclosures, I became relieved.
“After all,” I thought, “he knows that I am here in prison and that I
have kept silent. He will have been careful. These others—he has had some
reason for his incautiousness with them. But, he will not betray me, just
as he has betrayed none of his German associates.”
Then, on the night of January 30th, 1916, the governor of Reading Prison
informed me that I was to go to London the next day.
“Where to?” I asked.
“To Scotland Yard,” he said briefly.
“What for?”
“I do not know.”
My heart sank, for I realized at once that something had occurred which
was of vital import to me. I have faced firing squads in Mexico. I have
stood against a wall, waiting for the signal that should bid the soldiers
fire. And I have taken other dangerous chances, without, I believe,
more fear than another man would have known. But never have I felt
more reluctant than that night when I stood outside of Scotland Yard,
waiting—for what?
I was brought in to the office of the Assistant Commissioner and found
myself in the presence of four men, who regarded me gravely and in
silence. I had never seen them before, but later I learned their names:
Capt. William Hall of the Admiralty Intelligence Department; Mr. Nathan,
the Oriental expert of the Foreign Office; Captain Carter of the War
Office, and Mr. Basil Thompson, Assistant Commissioner of the Police of
London.
There was something tomb-like about the atmosphere of the room, I
thought, as I faced these men—and then I changed my opinion, for I
saw lying open on the table around which they were seated—a box of
cigarettes. I reached forward to take one, forgetting all politeness (for
I had not smoked in six weeks) when my eye caught sight of a little pink
slip of paper which one of them held in his hand—a slip which, I knew at
once, was the cause of my presence there.
It was Captain Hall who held the paper toward me. It read:
WASHINGTON, D. C.
September 1, 1914.
The Riggs National Bank,
Pay to the order of Mr. Bridgman Taylor two hundred dollars.
F. VON PAPEN.
When I had read it he turned over the check so that I could see the
endorsement.
They were all watching me. The room was very still. I could hear myself
breathe. Mr. Nathan of the Foreign Office handed me a pen and paper.
“Sign this name, please—Mr. Bridgman Taylor.”
I knew it would be folly to attempt to disguise my handwriting. I wrote
out my name. It corresponded exactly with the endorsement on the back of
the check.
“Do you know that check?” he asked.
“Yes,” I admitted, racking my wits for a possible explanation of the
affair.
“Why was it issued?”
I had an inspiration.
“Von Papen gave it to me to go to Europe and join the army—but you see I
didn’t——”
“Ah! Von Papen gave it to you.”
I was doing quick thinking. My first fright was over, but I realized
that that little check might easily be my death warrant. I knew that von
Papen had many reports and instructions bearing my name. I was afraid to
admit to myself that after all these months of security, I had at last
been discovered. Von Papen’s check proved that I had received money from
a representative of the German Government. There might be other papers
which would prove every thing needed to sentence me to execution. I was
groping around for an idea—and then in a flash I realized the truth. It
angered and embittered me.
There passed across my memory the year and more of solitary confinement,
during which I had held my tongue.
I swung around on the Englishmen.
“Are you the executioners of the German Government?” I asked. “Are you so
fond of von Papen that you want to do him a favor? If you shoot me you
will be obliging him.”
The four grave faces looked at me. “We are going to prosecute you on this
evidence,” was the only answer.
“You English pride yourselves,” I said, “on not being taken in. Von
Papen is a very clever man. Are you going to let him use you for his
own purposes? Do you think he was foolish enough not to realize that
those papers would be seized? Do you think”—this part of it was a random
shot, and lucky—“do you think it is an accident that the only papers
he carried, referring to a live, unsentenced man in England refer to
me? Just think! Von Papen has been recalled. The United States can
investigate his actions now without embarrassment. And he, knowing me
to be one of the connecting links in the chain of his activities, and
knowing that I am a prisoner liable to extradition, would ask nothing
better than to be permanently rid of me. And in the papers he carried he
very obligingly furnished you with incriminating evidence against me. You
can choose for yourselves. Do him this favor if you want to. But I think
I’m worth more to you alive than dead. Especially now that I see how very
willing my own government is to have me dead.”
The four men exchanged glances. I had made the appeal as a forlorn hope.
Would they accept it and the promise it implied? I could not tell from
their next words.
“We shall discuss that further,” said Captain Carter. “You will return to
Reading.”
The next few days were full of anxiety for me. I could not tell how
my appeal had been regarded, but I knew that it would be only by good
fortune that I should escape at least a trial for espionage—for that is
what my presence in England would mean. Finally I received a tentative
assurance of immunity if I should tell what I knew of the workings of
German secret agencies.
In spite of any hesitancy I might formerly have felt at such a course,
I decided to make a confession. Von Papen’s betrayal of me—for that he
had intentionally betrayed me, I was, and am, convinced—was too wanton
to arouse in me any feeling except a desire for my freedom, which for
fifteen months I had been robbed of, merely through the silence which
my own sense of honor imposed upon me. But I must be careful. I had no
desire to injure anyone whom von Papen had not implicated. And I did not
wish to betray any secret which I could safely withhold.
I speculated upon what other documents von Papen might have carried.
So far as I knew the only one involving me was the check; but of that
I could not be sure, nor did it seem likely. It was more probable that
there were other papers which would be used to test the sincerity of my
story. My aim was to tell only such things as were already known, or were
quite harmless. But how to do that? I needed some inkling as to what I
might tell and on what I must be silent.
That knowledge was difficult to obtain, but I finally secured it through
a rather adroit questioning of one of the men who interrogated me at the
time. He had shown me much courtesy and no little sympathy; and after
some pains I managed to worm out of him a very indefinite but useful idea
of what matters the von Papen documents covered.
What I learned was sufficient to enable me to exclude from my story any
facts implicating men who might be harmed by my disclosures. I told of
the Welland Canal plot so far as my part in it was concerned, and I told
of von Papen’s share in that and other activities. And I took care to
incorporate in my confession the promise of immunity that had been made
me tentatively.
“I have made these statements,” I wrote, “on the distinct understanding
that the statements I have made, or should make in the future, will not
be used against me; that I am not to be prosecuted for participation
in any enterprise directed against the United Kingdom or her Allies I
engaged in at the direction of Captain von Papen or other representatives
of the German Government; and that the promise made to me by Capt.
William Hall, Chief of the Intelligence Department of the Admiralty,
in the presence of Mr. Basil Thompson, former Governor of Tonga, and
Assistant Commissioner of Police, and in the presence of Superintendent
Quinn, political branch of Scotland Yard, that I am not to be extradited
or sent to any country where I am liable to punishment for political
offences, is made on behalf of His Majesty’s Government.”
It was on February 2nd that I turned in my confession and swore to the
truth of it. Affairs went better with me after that. I was sent to Lewes
Prison, and there I was content for the remainder of my stay in England.
And although I was still a prisoner I felt more free than I had felt
in many years. I was out of it all—free of the necessity to be always
watchful, always secret. And above all, I had cut myself loose from the
intriguing that I had once enjoyed, but which in the last two years I had
grown to hate more than I hated anything else on earth.
[Illustration: In the safe-deposit vault, the receipt for which is
reproduced herewith, Capt. von der Goltz deposited his Mexican Commission
and other papers which would prove his connection with the Mexican
Constitutionalist army. It will be noted that the receipt bears von der
Goltz’s signature as “B. H. Taylor,” the name under which he returned to
Europe.]
And there my own adventures end—so far as this book is concerned. I shall
not do more than touch upon my return to the United States on so far
different an errand than I had once planned. My testimony in the Grand
Jury proceedings against Captain Tauscher, von Igel and other of my
onetime fellow conspirators, is a matter of too recent record to deserve
more than passing mention. Tauscher, you will remember, was acquitted
because it was impossible to prove that he was aware of the objects
for which he had supplied explosives. Von Igel, Captain von Papen’s
secretary, was protected by diplomatic immunity. And Fritzen and Covani,
my former lieutenants, had not yet been captured.[4]
But though my intriguing was ended, Germany’s was not. It may be
interesting to consider these intrigues, in the light of what I had
learned during those two years—and what I have discovered since.
CHAPTER X.
_The German intrigue against the United States. Von Papen,
Boy-Ed and von Rintelen, and the work they did. How the
German-Americans were used and how they were betrayed._
In the long record of German intrigue in the United States one fact
stands out predominantly. If you consider the tremendous ramifications
of the system that Germany has built, the extent of its organization and
the efficiency with which so gigantic a secret work was carried on, you
will realize that this system was not the work of a short period but
of many years. As a matter of fact, Germany had laid the foundation of
that structure of espionage and conspiracy many years before—even before
the time when the United States first became a Colonial Power and thus
involved herself in the tangle of world politics.
I am making no rash assertions when I state that ten years ago the course
which German agents should adopt toward the United States in the event
of a great European war, had been determined with a reasonable amount
of exactness by the General Staff, and that it was this plan that was
adapted to the conditions of the moment, and set into operation at the
outbreak of the present conflict. No element of hostility lay behind this
planning. Germany had no grievance against you; and whatever potential
causes of conflict existed between the two nations lay far in the future.
That plan, so complete in detail, so menacing in its intent, was but
part of a world plan that should assure to Germany when the time was
ripe the submission of all her enemies and the peaceful assistance and
acquiescence in her aims of whatever parts of the world should at that
time remain at peace. Germany looked far ahead on that day when she first
knew that war must come. She realized, if no other nation did, that
however strong in themselves the combatants were, the neutrals who should
command the world’s supplies, would really determine the victory.
Knowing this, Germany—which does not play the game of diplomacy with
gloves on—laid her plans accordingly.
The United States offered a peculiarly fruitful field for her endeavors.
By tradition and geography divorced from European rivalries, it was,
nevertheless, from both an industrial and agricultural standpoint,
obviously to become the most important of neutral nations. The United
State alone could feed and equip a continent; and it needed no prophet to
perceive that whichever country could appropriate to itself her resources
would unquestionably win the war, if a speedy military victory were not
forthcoming.
It was Germany’s aim, therefore, to prepare the way by which she could
secure these supplies, or, failing in that, to keep them from the enemy,
England—if England it should be. In a military way such a plan had
little chance of success. England’s command of the seas was too complete
for Germany to consider that she could establish a successful blockade
against her. It was then, I fancy, that Germany bethought herself of a
greatly potential ally in the millions of citizens of German birth or
parentage with whom the United States was filled.
One may extract a trifle of cynical amusement from what followed. Those
millions of German-Americans had never been regarded with affection in
Berlin. The vast majority of them were descendants of men who had left
their homes for political reasons; and of those who had been born in
Germany many had emigrated to escape military service, and others had
gone to seek a better opportunity than their native land provided. They
had been called renegades who had given up their true allegiance for
citizenship in a foreign country, and Bernstorff himself, according to
the evidence of U. S. Senator Phelan, had said that he regarded them as
traitors and cowards.
But Germany voicing her own spleen in private and Germany with an axe to
grind, were two different beings. And no one who observed the honeyed
beginnings of the _Deutschtum_ movement in America would have believed
that these men who in public were so assiduously and graciously flattered
were in private characterized as utter traitors to the Fatherland—and
worse.
Certainly no one believed it when, in 1900, Prince Henry of Prussia paid
his famous visit to America. No word of criticism of these “traitors” was
spoken by him; and when at banquets glasses were raised and Milwaukee
smiled across the table at Berlin, the sentimental onlooker might have
known a gush of joy at this spectacle of amity and reconciliation. And
the sentimental onlooker would never have suspected that Prince Henry
had traveled three thousand miles for any other purpose than to attend
the launching of the Kaiser’s yacht _Meteor_, which was then building in
an American yard.
But to the cynical observer, searching the records of the years
immediately following Prince Henry’s visit, a few strange facts would
have become apparent. He would have discovered that German societies,
which had been neither very numerous nor popular before, had in a
comparatively short time acquired a membership and a prominence that
were little short of remarkable. He would have noted the increasing
number of German teachers and professors who appeared on the faculties of
American schools and colleges. He would have remarked upon the growth in
popularity of the German newspapers, many of them edited by Germans who
had never become naturalized. And yet, observing these things, he might
have agreed with the vast majority of Americans, in regarding them as
entirely harmless and of significance merely as a proof of how hard love
of one’s native land dies.
He would have been mistaken had he so regarded them. The German
Government does not spend money for sentimental purposes; and in the
last ten years that Government has expended literally millions of dollars
for propaganda in the United States. It has consistently encouraged a
sentiment for the Fatherland that should be so strong that it would hold
first place in the heart of every German-American. It has circulated
pamphlets advocating the exclusive use of the German language, not merely
in the homes, but in shops and street cars and all other public places.
It has lent financial support to German organizations in America, and in
a thousand ways has aimed so to win the hearts of the German-Americans
that when the time should come the United States, by sheer force of
numbers, would be delivered, bound hand and foot, into the hands of the
German Government.
It was this object of undermining the true allegiance of the German
citizens of the United States which transformed an innocent and natural
tendency into a menace that was the more insidious because the very
people involved were, for the most part, entirely ignorant of its
true nature. Germany seized upon an attachment that was purely one of
sentiment and race and sought to make it an instrument of political
power; and she went about her work with so efficient a secrecy that she
very nearly accomplished her purpose.
By the time the Great War broke out the German propaganda in America had
assumed notable proportions. German newspapers were plentiful and had
acquired a tremendous influence over the minds of German-speaking folk.
Many of the German societies had been consolidated into one national
organization—the German-American National Alliance, with a membership of
two millions, and a president, C. J. Hexamer of Chicago, whose devotion
to the Fatherland has been so great that he has since been decorated
with the Order of the Red Eagle. And the German people of the United
States had, by a long campaign of flattery and cajolery, coupled with a
systematic glorification of German genius and institutions, been won to
attachment to the country of their origin that required only a touch to
translate it into fanaticism.
Germany had set the stage and rehearsed the chorus. There were needed
only the principals to make the drama complete. These she provided in the
persons of four men: Franz von Papen, Karl Boy-Ed, Heinrich Albert, and
later, Franz von Rintelen.
They were no ordinary men whom Germany had appointed to the leadership
of this giant underground warfare against a peaceful country. Highly
bred, possessing a wide and intensive knowledge of finance, of military
strategy and of diplomatic finesse, they were admirably equipped to win
the admiration and trust of the people of this country, at the very
moment that they were attacking them. All of them were men skilled in the
art of making friends; and so successfully did they employ this art that
their popularity for a long time contrived to shield them from suspicion.
Each of these men was assigned to the command of some particular branch
of German secret service. And each brought to his task the resources of
the scientist, the soldier and the statesman, coupled with the scruples
of the bandit.
It is impossible in this brief space to tell the full story of the
activities of these gentlemen and of their many, highly trained
assistants. Violence, as you know, played no small part in their plans.
Sedition, strikes in munitions plants, attacks upon ships carrying
supplies to the Allies, the crippling of transportation facilities,
bomb outrages—these are a few of the main elements in the campaign to
render the United States useless as a source of supply for Germany’s
enemies. But ultimately of far more importance than this was a program
of publicity that should not only present to the German-Americans the
viewpoint of their fatherland (an entirely legitimate propaganda) but
which was aimed to consolidate them into a political unit which should be
used, by peaceful means if possible—such as petitions and the like—and if
that method failed, by _absolute armed resistance_, to force the United
States Government to declare an embargo upon shipments of munitions and
foodstuffs to the Allies, and to compel it to assume a position, if
not of active alliance with Germany (a hope that was never seriously
entertained) at least one which should distinctly favor the German
Government and cause serious dissension between America and England.
There followed a two-fold campaign; on the one hand active terrorism
against private industry insofar as it was of value to the Allies,
reinforced by the most determined plots against Canada; on the other
an insincere and lying propaganda that presented the United States
Government as a pretender of a neutrality which it did not attempt to
practise—as an institution controlled by men who were unworthy of the
support of any but Anglophiles and hypocrites.
Left to itself the sympathy of German-Americans would have been directed
toward Germany; stimulated as it was by an unremitting campaign
of publicity, this sympathy became a devotion almost rabid in its
intensity. Race consciousness was aroused, and placed upon the defensive
by the attitude of the larger portion of the American press, the
German-Americans became defiant and aggressive in their apologies for the
Fatherland. Even those whose German origin was so remote that they were
ignorant of the very language of their fathers, subscribed to newspapers
and periodicals whose sole reason for existence was that they presented
the truth—as Germany saw it. If in that presentation the German press
adopted a tone that was seditious—why, there were those in Berlin who
would applaud the more heartily. And in New York Captain von Papen and
his colleagues would read and nod their heads approvingly.
At the end of the first two months of the war, and of my active service
in America, the campaign of violence was well under way. Already plans
had been made for several enterprises other than the Welland Canal plot,
which I have discussed already. Attacks had been planned against several
vulnerable points in the Canadian Pacific Railway, such as the St. Clair
Tunnel, running under the Detroit River at Point Huron, Mich.; agents
had been planted in the various munitions factories, and spies were
everywhere seeking possible points of vantage at which a blow for Germany
could be struck. A plan had even then been made to blow up the railroad
bridge at Vanceboro.
But already von Papen and his associates, including myself, knew that
Germany could never succeed in crippling Allied commerce in the United
States and in proceeding effectively against Canada until we could count
upon the implicit co-operation of the German-Americans, even though that
co-operation involved active disloyalty to the country of their adoption.
There lay the difficulty. That the bulk of the German-Americans were
loyal to their government, I knew at the time. Now, happily, that is a
matter that is beyond doubt. Among them there were, of course, many whose
zeal outran their scruples and others whose scruples were for sale. But
for the most part, although they could be cajoled into a partnership
that was not always prudent, they could not be led beyond this point
into positive defiance of the United States, however mistaken they might
believe its policies.
The rest of the story I cannot tell at first hand, for I was not directly
concerned in the events that followed. What I know I have pieced together
from my recollection of conversations with von Papen, and from what many
people in Berlin, who thought I was familiar with the affair, told me.
Who fathered the idea, I do not know. Some one conceived a scheme so
treacherous and contemptible that every other act of this war seems white
beside it. _It was planned so to discredit the German-Americans that the
hostility of their fellow-citizens would force them back into the arms
of the German Government._ These millions of American citizens of German
descent were to be given the appearance of disloyalty, in order that they
might become objects of suspicion to their fellows, and through their
resentment at this attitude the cleavage between Germans and non-Germans
in this country would be increased and perhaps culminate in armed
conflict.
On the face of it this looks like the absurd and impossible dream of
an insane person, rather than a diplomatic program. And yet, if it be
examined more closely, the plan will be seen to have a psychological
basis that, however far-fetched, is essentially sound. Given a people
already bewildered by the almost universal condemnation of a country
which they have sincerely revered; add to that serious difference in
sympathies an attitude of distrust of all German-Americans by the
other inhabitants of this country; and you have sown the seed of a
race-antagonism that if properly nurtured may easily grow into a violent
hatred. In a word, Germany had decided that if the German-Americans could
not be coaxed back into the fold they might be beaten back. She set
about her part of the task with an industry that would have commanded
admiration had it been better employed.
Glance back over the history of the past three years and consider how,
almost over night, the “hyphen” situation developed. America, shaken by a
war which had been declared to be impossible, become suddenly conscious
of the presence within her borders of a portion of her population—a
nation in numbers—largely unassimilated, retaining its own language,
and possessing characteristics which suddenly became conspicuously
distasteful. Inevitably, as I say, the cleavage in sympathies produced
distrust. But it was not until stories of plots in which German-Americans
were implicated became current that this distrust developed into an acute
suspicion. Germanophobia was rampant in those days, and to hysterical
persons it was unthinkable that any German could be exempt from the
suspicion of treason.
It was upon this foundation that the German agents erected their
structure of lies and defamation. Not content with the efforts which
the jingo press and jingo individuals were unconsciously making in
their behalf, they deliberately set on foot rumors which were intended
to increase the distrust of German-Americans. I happen to know that
during the first two years of the war, many of the stories about German
attempts upon Canada, about German-American complicity in various plots,
_emanated from the offices of Captain von Papen and his associates_. I
know also that many plots in which German-Americans were concerned had
been deliberately encouraged by von Papen and afterward as deliberately
betrayed! Time after time, enterprises with no chance of success were set
on foot with the sole purpose of having them fail—for thus Germany could
furnish to the world evidence that America was honey-combed with sedition
and treachery—evidence which Americans themselves would be the first to
accept.
It was in reality a gigantic game of bluff. Germany wished to give
to the world convincing proof that all peoples of German descent were
solidly supporting her. It was for this reason that reports of impossible
German activities were set afloat; that rumors of Germans massing in
the Maine woods, of aëroplane flights over Canada, and of all sorts
of enterprises which had no basis in fact, were disseminated. And
since many anti-German papers had been indiscreet enough to attack the
German-Americans as disloyal, the German agents used and fomented these
attacks for their own purposes.
Who could gain by such a campaign of slander and the feeling it would
produce? Certainly not the Administration, which had great need of a
united country behind it. Certainly not the American press, which was
certain to lose circulation and advertising; nor American business, which
would suffer from the loss of thousands of customers of German descent,
who would turn to the German merchant for their needs. Only two classes
could profit: the German press, which was liberally subsidized by the
German Government, and the German Government itself.
It was to the interests of the administration at Washington to keep the
country united by keeping the Germans disunited. The reverse condition
would tend to indicate that Americanism was a failure, since the country
was divided at a critical time; it would seriously hamper the Government
in its dealings with all the warring nations; and it would be of benefit
only to the German societies and German press, and through them to the
German Government. It _was_ of benefit. The German newspapers increased
their circulations and advertising revenues, in many cases by more than
one hundred per cent. German banks and insurance companies received money
that had formerly gone to American institutions and which now went to
swell the Imperial German War Loans. And the German clubs increased their
memberships and became more and more instruments of power in the work of
Germany.
There is a typical German club in New York—the _Deutscher Verein_ on
Central Park South. During the war it has been used as a sub-office of
the German General Staff. It was here that von Papen used to store the
dynamite that was needed in such enterprises as the Welland Canal plot.
It was here that conspirators used to meet for conferences which no one,
not even the other members of the club, could tell were not as innocent
as they seemed.
These German societies and other agencies were used not merely to promote
sympathy for the German cause, but also to influence public opinion in
matters of purely American interest. On January 21, 1916, Henry Weismann,
president of the Brooklyn branch of the German-American National Alliance
sent a report to headquarters in Chicago, regarding the activities of his
organization in the recent elections. In the Twenty-third Congressional
District of New York, Ellsworth J. Healy had been a candidate for
Congress. Both he and another man, John J. Fitzgerald, candidate for
Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, were regarded by German
interests as “unneutral.” They were defeated, and Weismann in commenting
upon the matter, wrote: “_The election returns prove that Deutschtum is
armed and able, when the word is given, to seat its men._”
Even in the campaign for preparedness Germany took a hand. Berlin was
appealed to in some cases as to the attitude that American citizens of
German descent should adopt toward this policy. Professor Appelmann of
the University of Vermont wrote to Dr. Paul Rohrbach, one of the advisers
of the Wilhelmstrasse, requesting his advice upon the subject. Dr.
Rohrbach replied that American _Deutschtum_ should not be in favor of
preparedness, because “_it is quite conceivable that in the event of an
American-Japanese war, Germany might adopt an attitude of very benevolent
neutrality toward Japan and so make it easier for Japan to defeat the
United States_.” And not long ago the _Herold des Glaubens_ of St. Louis,
made this statement: “When we found that the agitation for preparedness
was in the interest of the munition makers and that its aim was a war
with Germany, we certainly turned against it and we have agitated against
it for the last three months.”
But this anti-militaristic spirit was a rather sudden development on the
part of the German societies. In 1911, when a new treaty of arbitration
with Great Britain was under consideration, a group of roughs, _led and
organized by a German_, violently broke up a meeting held under the
auspices of the New York Peace Society to support that treaty. The man
who broke that meeting up was Alphonse G. Koelble. It was this same
Koelble who in 1915, when Germany’s attack upon America was most bitter,
organized a meeting of “The Friends of Peace,” in order to protest
against militarism! Strange, is it not, this inconsistency? _Or was it
that Mr. Koelble was acting under orders?_
Germany did these things not only for their political effect, but also
because she knew that she could turn the evidence of her own meddling
to account. It was for the same reason that Wolf von Igel, von Papen’s
secretary and successor, retained in his office a list of American
citizens of German descent who “could be relied on.” This list was found
by agents of the Department of Justice when von Igel’s office was raided.
And the German agents were glad it was discovered. _It gave to Americans
an additional proof of the hold that Germany had obtained over a large
group of German-Americans._
It was as late as March, 1916, that the members of the Minnesota chapter
of the German-American National Alliance received a circular, advising
them of the attitude _toward Germany_ of the various candidates for
delegate to the national conventions of the different parties, and
indicating by a star the names of those men “about whom it has been
ascertained that they are in agreement with the views and wishes of
_Deutschland_ and that if elected they will act accordingly.” I do not
believe that the men who sent that circular expected it to be widely
obeyed. But unquestionably they knew it would be made public.
I think that if the German conspirators in America had confined their
activities to this field they might ultimately have succeeded. They had
managed to seduce a sufficient number of German-Americans to cause the
entire German-American population to be regarded with suspicion. They
had contrived to discredit the pacifist and labor movements by making
public their own connection with individuals in these bodies. They had
aroused the public to such a pitch of distrust that in the Presidential
campaign of 1916 the support of the “German vote” was regarded with
distaste by both candidates. And they had helped to create so tremendous
a dissension in America that friendships of long standing were broken up,
German merchants in many communities lost all but their German customers,
and German-Americans were belabored in print with such twaddle as the
following:
“The German-Americans predominate in the grog-shops, low dives, pawn
shops and numerous artifices for money-making and corrupt practices in
politics.”
The foregoing statement, which I quote from a book, “German Conspiracies
in the United States,” written by a gentleman named Skaggs, is not
perhaps a fair sample of the attacks made upon German-Americans by the
press in general, but it is indicative of the heights to which feeling
ran in the case of a few uninformed or hysterical persons. The point is
that to a large portion of the populace the German-Americans had become
enemies and objects of abuse.
They, in turn, beset on all sides by a campaign of slander insidiously
fostered by men to whom they had given their trust, did exactly what had
been expected. They fell right into the arms of that movement which for
fourteen years had been subsidized for that very purpose. They ceased
to read American newspapers. They read German newspapers, many of which
almost openly preached disloyalty to the United States. They became
clannish and joined German societies which frequently contained German
agents. They began to boycott American business houses and dealt only
with those of German affiliations.
Germany had gained her point. She alone could gain by the disunity
of the country. It was to her advantage that the profits which had
formerly gone to American business houses should be deflected to German
corporations. _And had she rested her efforts there, she might, as I say,
have seen them produce results in the form of riots and armed dissension,
which would have effectively prevented the United States from entering
the war._
But Germany over-reached herself. Emboldened by the apparent success
of their schemes, her principal agents, von Papen, Boy-Ed and von
Rintelen (who had begun his work in January, 1915) became careless, so
far as secrecy was concerned, and so audacious in their plans that they
betrayed themselves, perhaps intentionally, as a final demonstration of
their power. The results you know. Insofar as the disclosures of their
activities tended further to implicate the German-Americans, they did
harm. But by those very disclosures the eyes of many German-Americans
were opened to the true nature of the influence to which they had
been subjected, and through that fact the worst element of the German
propaganda in America received its death blow.
To-day the United States is at war and no intelligent man now questions
the loyalty of the majority of the citizens of German blood. That in
the past their sympathies have been with Germany is unquestioned and,
from their standpoint, entirely proper. That in many cases they view the
participation of the United States in the war with regret is probable.
But that they will stand up and if need be fight as staunchly as any
other group in the country, no man may doubt.
That is the story of the darkest chapter in the history of German
intrigue. Other things have been done in this war at which a humane man
may blush. Other crimes have been committed which not even the staunchest
partisan can condone. But at least it may be said that those things were
done to enemies or to neutral people whom fortune had put in the way of
injury. The betrayal of the German-Americans was a wanton crime against
men whom every association and every tie of kinship or tradition should
have served to protect.
Germany has not yet abandoned that attack. There are still spies in the
United States, you may be sure—still intrigues are being fostered. And
there are still men who, consciously or unconsciously, are striving to
discredit the German-Americans by presenting them as unwilling to bear
their share in the burden of the nation’s war. Only a week before these
lines were written one man—George Sylvester Viereck—circulated a petition
begging that Germans should not be sent to fight their countrymen, and
an organization of German Protestant churches in America is repeating
this plea. As a German whom fortune has placed outside the battle, and
as one whose patriotism is extended toward blood rather than dynasty, I
ask Mr. Viereck and these other gentlemen if they have not forgotten that
many German-Americans have already shown their feelings by volunteering
for service in this war—and if they have not also forgotten that the two
great wars of American history were fought between men of the same blood.
Ties of blood have never prevented men from fighting for a cause which
they believed to be just. They will not in this war! And when Mr. Viereck
and his kind protest against the participation in the war of men of any
descent whatever, they imply that the American cause is _not_ just and
that it is not worthy of the support of the men they claim to represent.
Is this their intention?
CHAPTER XI.
_More about the German intrigue against the United States.
German aims in Latin America. Japan and Germany in Mexico. What
happened in Cuba?_
“American intervention in Mexico would mean another Ireland, another
Poland—another sore spot in the world. Well, why not?”
Those were almost the last words spoken to me when I left Germany in
1914, upon my ill-fated mission to England. I had in my pocket at the
moment detailed memoranda of instructions which, if they could be carried
out, would insure such disturbances in Mexico that the United States
would be compelled to intervene. I had been given authority to spend
almost unlimited sums of money for the purchase of arms, for the bribery
of officials—for anything in fact that would cause trouble in Mexico.
And the words I have quoted were not spoken by an uninformed person with
a taste for cynical comment; they were uttered by Major Köhnemann,
of Abteilung III B of the German General Staff. They form a lucid and
concrete explanation of German activities in Mexico during the past eight
years.
Long before this war began German agents were at work in Mexico, stirring
up trouble in the hope of causing the United States to intervene. I
have already told how, in 1910 and 1911, Germany had encouraged Japan
and Mexico in negotiating a treaty that was to give Japan an important
foothold in Mexico. I have told how, after this treaty was well on the
way to completion, Germany saw to it that knowledge of the projected
terms was brought to the attention of the United States—thereby
indirectly causing Diaz’s abdication. That instance is not an isolated
case of Germany meddling in Mexican affairs. Rather is it symptomatic of
the traditional policy of Wilhelmstrasse in regard to America.
It may be well to examine this policy more closely than I have done. Long
ago Germany saw in South America a fertile field for exploitation, not
only in a commercial way, in which it presented excellent opportunities
to German manufacturers, but also as a possible opportunity for expansion
which had been denied her elsewhere. All of the German colonies were
in torrid climates, in which life for the white man was attended with
tremendous hardships and exploitation and colonization were consequently
impeded. Only in the Far East and in South America could she find
territories either unprotected through their own weakness, or so thinly
settled that they offered at once a temptation and an opportunity to
the nation with imperialistic ambitions. In the former quarter she was
blocked by a concert of the Powers, many of them actuated by similar
aims, but all working at such cross purposes that aggression by any one
of them was impossible. I have already alluded to the result of such
a situation in my discussion of the Anglo-Persian Agreement. In South
America there was only one formidable obstacle to German expansion—the
Monroe Doctrine.
I am stating the case with far less than its true complexity. There
were, it is true, many facts in the form of conflicting rivalries of
the Powers as well as internal conditions in South America, that would
have had a deterrent effect upon the German program. Nevertheless, it is
certain that the prime factor in keeping Germany out of South America was
the traditional policy of the United States; and, so far as the German
Government’s attitude in the matter is concerned, it is the only phase of
the problem worth considering.
Germany had no intention of securing territory by a war of conquest. Her
method was far simpler and much less assailable. She promptly instituted
a peaceful invasion of various parts of the continent; first in the
persons of merchants who captured trade but did not settle permanently in
the country; second, by means of a vast army of immigrants, who, unlike
those who a generation before had come to the United States, settled,
_but retained their German citizenship_. With this unnaturalized element
she hoped to form a nucleus in many of the important South American
countries, which, wielding a tremendous commercial power and possessing a
political influence that was considerable, although indirect, would aid
her in determining the course of South American politics so that by a
form of peaceful expansion she could eventually achieve her aims.
Was this a dream? At any rate it received the support of many of the
ablest statesmen of Germany, who duly set about the task of discrediting
the Monroe Doctrine in the eyes of the very people it was designed to
protect, so that the United States, if it ever came forcibly to defend
the Doctrine, would find itself opposed not only by Germany but by South
America as well.
Now, the easiest way to cast suspicion upon a policy is to discredit the
sponsor of it. In the case of the United States and South America this
was not at all difficult; for the southern nations already possessed a
well defined fear and a dislike of their northern neighbor that were not
by any means confined to the more ignorant portions of the population.
Fear of American aggression has been somewhat of a bugaboo in many
quarters. Recognizing this, Germany, which has always adopted the policy
of aggravating ready-made troubles for her own ends, steadily fomented
that fear by means of a quiet but well-conducted propaganda, _and also by
seeking to force the United States into taking action that would justify
that fear_.
As a means toward securing this latter end, Mexico presented itself as a
heaven-sent opportunity. Even in the days when it was, to outward eyes,
a well-ordered community, there had been men in the United States who
had expressed themselves in favor of an expansion southward which would
result in the ultimate absorption of Mexico; and although such talk had
never attracted much attention in the quarter from which it emanated,
there were those who saw to it that proposals of this sort received
an effective publicity south of the Isthmus. Given, then, a Mexico in
which discontent had become so acute that it was being regarded with
alarm by American and foreign investors, the possibility of intervention
became more immediate and the opportunity of the trouble-maker increased
proportionately.
[Illustration: The order for the deportation of von der Goltz which for
some reason was not put into effect.]
Germany’s first step in this direction, was, as you know, the
encouragement of a Japanese-Mexican alliance, the failure of which was
a vital part of her program. It was a risky undertaking, for if, by any
chance, the alliance were successfully concluded, the United States might
well hesitate to attack the combined forces of the two countries; and
Mexico, fortified by Japan, would present a bulwark against the real or
fancied danger of American expansion, that, for a time at least, would
effectually allay the fears of South America. That risk Germany took,
and insofar as she had planned to prevent the alliance scored a success.
That she failed in her principal aim was due to the anti-imperialistic
tendencies of the United States and the statesmanship of Señor
Limantour, rather than to any other cause.
Then came the Madero Administration with its mystical program of
reform—and an opposition headed by almost all of the able men in the
republic, both Mexican and foreign. Bitterly fought by the ring of
Cientificoes, who saw the easy spoils of the past slipping from their
hands; distrusted by many honest men, who sincerely believed that Mexico
was better ruled by an able despot than by an upright visionary; hampered
by the aloofness of foreign business and governments, waiting for a
success which they alone could insure, before they should approve and
support; and constantly beset with uneasiness by the incomprehensible
attitude of the Taft Administration and of its Ambassador—the fate of the
Madero Government was easily foreseen.
Before Madero had been in power for three months this opposition had
taken form as a campaign of obstruction in the Mexican Chamber of
Deputies, supported by the press, controlled almost exclusively by
the Cientificoes and by foreign capitalists; by the clergy, who had
reason to suspect the Government of anti-clerical tendencies; and by
isolated groups of opportunity seekers who saw in the Administration an
obstacle to their own political and economic aims. The Madero family
were represented as incompetent and self-seeking; and in a short time the
populace, which a month before had hailed the new government as a savior
of the country, had been persuaded that its program of economic reform
had been merely a political pretense, and accordingly added its strength
to the party of the Opposition.
Here was tinder aplenty for a conflagration of sorts. Germany applied the
torch at its most inflammable spot.
That inflammable spot happened to be a man—Pazcual Orozco. Orozco had
been one of Madero’s original supporters, and in the days of the Madero
revolution had rendered valuable services to his chief. An ex-muleteer,
uncouth and without education, he possessed considerable ability;
but his vanity and reputation were far in excess of his attainments.
Unquestionably he had expected that Madero’s success would mean a
brilliant future for himself, although it is difficult to tell in just
what direction his ambitions pointed. Madero had placed him in command
of the most important division of the Federal army, but this presumably
did not content him. At any rate, early in February, 1912, he made a
demand upon the Government for two hundred and fifty thousand pesos,
threatening that he would withdraw from the services of the Government
unless this “honorarium”—honesty would call it a bribe—were paid to him.
Madero refused his demand, but with mistaken leniency retained Orozco in
office—and on February 27, Orozco repaid this trust by turning traitor at
Chihuahua, and involving in his defection six thousand of Mexico’s best
troops as well as a quantity of supplies.
Now mark the trail of German intrigue. In Mexico City, warmly supporting
the Madero Government, but of little real power in the country, was the
German Minister, Admiral von Hintze. Under normal circumstances, his
influence would have been of great value in helping to render secure
the position of Madero; but with means of communication disrupted as
they were to a large extent, his power was inconceivably less than
that of the German consuls, all of whom were well liked and respected
by the Mexicans with whom they were in close touch. Apart from their
political office, these men represented German business interests in
Mexico, particularly in the fields of hardware and banking. In the three
northern cities of Parral, Chihuahua and Zacatecas, the German consuls
were hardware merchants. In Torreon the consul was director of the
German bank. As such it would seem that it was to their interests to work
for the preservation of a stable government in Mexico. And yet the fact
remains that when Orozco first began to show signs of discontent, these
men encouraged him with a support that was both moral and financial; and
when the general finally turned traitor, it was my old friend, Consul
Kueck, who, as President of the Chamber of Commerce of Chihuahua, voted
to support him and to recognize Orozco’s supremacy in that State!
I leave it to the reader to decide whether it was the Minister or the
consuls who really represented the German Government.
It would be idle to attempt to trace more than in the briefest way
Germany’s part in the events of the next few years. Always she followed
a policy of obstruction and deceit. During the months immediately
succeeding the Orozco outbreak, at the very moment that von Hintze was
lending his every effort to the preservation of the Madero regime,
sending to Berlin reports which over and over again reiterated his belief
that Madero could, if given a free hand, restore order in the republic,
the German consuls were openly fomenting disorder in the North.
They were particularly well equipped to make trouble, by their position
in the community and by the character and reputation of the rest of the
German population. It may be said with safety that however careless
Germany has been about the quality of the men whom she has allowed to
emigrate to other countries, her representatives throughout all of
Latin-America have been conspicuous for their commercial attainments and
for their social adaptability. This, in a large way has been responsible
for the German commercial success in Central and South America. As
bankers they have been honest and obliging in the matter of credit. As
merchants they have adapted themselves to the local conditions and to
the habits of their customers with notable success. In consequence they
have been well-liked as individuals and have been of immense value in
increasing the prestige of the German Empire. In Mexico they were the
only foreigners who were not disliked by either peon or aristocrat; and
it is significant to note that during seven years of unrest in that
country, Germans alone among peoples of European stock have remained
practically unmolested by any party.
Consider of what service this condition was in their campaign. Respected,
influential, they were in an excellent position to stimulate whatever
anti-American feeling existed in the Latin American countries. At the
same time, they were equally well situated to encourage the unrest in
Mexico that would be the surest guarantee of American intervention—and
the coalition against the United States which intervention would be
certain to provoke. They made the utmost use of their advantage, and they
did it without arousing suspicion or rebuke.
After the failure of the short-lived Orozco outbreak, events in
Mexico seemed to promise a peaceful solution of all difficulties.
Many of Madero’s opponents declared a truce, and the irreconcileables
were forced to bide their time in apparent harmlessness. In November
came the rebellion of Felix Diaz, fathered by a miscellaneous group
of conspirators who hoped to find in the nephew sufficient of the
characteristics of the great Porfirio to serve their purposes. This
venture failed also. Again Madero showed a mistaken leniency in
preserving the life of Diaz. He paid for it with his life. Out of this
uprising came the _coup d’etat_ of General Huerta—made possible by a dual
treachery—and the murder of the only man who at the time gave promise of
eventually solving the Mexican problem.
What share German agents had in that tragic affair I do not know. You may
be sure that they took advantage of any opportunity that presented itself
to encourage the conspirators in a project that gave such rich promise
of aiding them in their purposes. I pass on to the next positive step in
their campaign. That was a repetition of their old plan of inserting the
Japanese question into the general muddle.
The Japanese question in Mexico is a very real one. I know—and the
United States Government presumably knows, also—that Japan is the only
nation which has succeeded in gaining a permanent foothold in Mexico. I
know that spies and secret agents in the guise of peddlars, engineers,
fishermen, farmers, charcoal burners, merchants and even officers in
the armies of every Mexican leader have been scattered throughout the
country. The number of these latter I have heard estimated at about
eight hundred; at any rate it is considerable. There are also about ten
thousand Japanese who have no direct connection with Tokio but who are
practically all men of military age, either unmarried or without wives in
Mexico—most of them belonging to the army or navy reserve. And, like the
Germans, the Japanese never lose their connection with the Government in
their capacity as private individuals.
Through the great government-owned steamship line, the Toyo Kisen
Kaisha, the Japanese Government controls the land for a Japanese coaling
station at Manzanilla. At Acapulco a Japanese company holds a land
concession on a high hill three miles from the sea. It is difficult to
see what legitimate use a fishing company could make of this location.
It is, however, an ideal site for a wireless station. In Mexico City an
intimate friend of the Japanese Chargé d’Affaires owns a fortress-like
building in the very heart of the capital. Another Japanese holds, under
a ninety-nine year lease, an L-shaped strip of land partly surrounding
and completely commanding the water works of the capital of Oxichimilco.
The land is undeveloped. Both of these Japanese are well supplied with
money and have been living in Mexico City for several years. Neither one
has any visible means of support. And in all of the years of revolution
in Mexico no Japanese have been killed—except by Villa. He has caused
many of them to be executed, but always those that were masquerading as
Chinese. Naturally a government cannot protest under such circumstances.
These facts may or may not be significant. They serve to lend color to
the convictions of anti-Japanese agitators in the United States, and as
such they have been of value to Germany. Accordingly it was suggested to
Señor Huerta that an alliance with Japan would be an excellent protective
measure for him to take.
Huerta had two reasons for looking with favor upon this proposal. He was
very decidedly in the bad graces of Washington, and he was constantly
menaced by the presence in Mexico of Felix Diaz, to whom he had agreed
to resign the Presidency. Diaz was too popular to be shot, too strong
politically to be exiled and yet—he must be removed. Here, thought
Huerta, was an opportunity of killing two birds with one stone. He
therefore sent Diaz to Japan, ostensibly to thank the Japanese Government
for its participation in the Mexican Centennial celebration, three years
before, but in reality to begin negotiations for a treaty which should
follow the lines of the one unsuccessfully promulgated in 1911.
Señor Diaz started for Japan—but he never arrived there. Somehow the
State Department at Washington got news of the proposed treaty—how, only
the German agents know—and Señor Diaz’s course was diverted.
Meanwhile, in spite of the strained relations between Huerta and
Washington, Germany was aiding the Mexican president with money and
supplies. In the north, Consuls Kueck of Chihuahua, Sommer of Durango,
Muller of Hermosillo, and Weber of Juarez were exhibiting the same
interest in the Huertista troops that they had formerly displayed toward
Orozco. Kueck, as I happened to learn later, had financed Salvator
Mercado, the general who had so obligingly tried to have me shot; and at
the same time he was assiduously spreading reports of unrest in Mexico,
and even attempted to bribe some Germans to leave the country, upon the
plea that their lives were in danger.
When I raided the German Consulate at Chihuahua, I found striking
documentary proof of his activities in this direction. There were letters
there proving that he had paid to various Germans sums ranging as high
as fifty dollars a month, upon condition that they should remain outside
of Mexico. These letters, in many cases, showed plainly that this was
done in order to make it seem that the unrest was endangering the lives
of foreign inhabitants; in spite of which several of the recipients
complained that their absence from Mexico was causing them considerable
financial loss, and showed an evident desire to brave whatever dangers
there might be—if they could secure the permission of Consul Kueck.
During the year and more that Huerta held power, Germany followed the
same tactics. I need not remind you of the attempt to supply Huerta with
munitions after the United States had declared an embargo upon them; or
that it has been generally admitted that the real purpose of the seizure
of Vera Cruz by United States marines was to prevent the German steamer
_Ypiranga_ from delivering her cargo of arms to the Mexicans. That is but
one instance of the way in which German policy worked—a policy which, as
I have indicated, was opposed to the true interests of Mexico, and has
been solely directed against the United States. Up to the very outbreak
of the war it continued. After Villa’s breach with Carranza, emissaries
of Consul Kueck approached the former with offers of assistance.
Strangely enough he rejected them, principally because he hates the
Germans for the assistance they gave his old enemy, Orozco. Villa had,
moreover, a personal grudge against Kueck. When General Mercado was
defeated at Ojinaga, papers were found in his effects that implicated
the Consul in a conspiracy against the Constitutionalists, although at
the time Kueck professed friendship for Villa and was secretly doing all
he could to increase the friction that existed between the general and
Mercado. Villa had sworn vengeance against the double-dealer; and Kueck,
in alarm, fled into the United States.
With the outbreak of the Great War the situation changed in one important
particular. Heretofore, German activities had been part of a plan of
attack upon the prestige of the United States. Now they became necessary
as a measure of defense. Before two months had passed it became evident
to the German Government that the United States _must_ be forced into a
war with Mexico in order to prevent the shipment of munitions to Europe.
So began the last stage of the German intrigue in Mexico—an intrigue
which still continues. As a preliminary step, Germany had organized her
own citizens in that country into a well-drilled military unit—a little
matter which Captain von Papen had attended to during the spring of 1914.
One can read much between the lines of the report sent to the Imperial
Chancellor by Admiral von Hintze, commenting upon the work of Captain von
Papen in this direction. The Admiral says in part: “He showed especial
industry in organizing the Germany colony for purposes of self-defense,
and out of this shy and factious material, unwilling to undertake any
military activity, he obtained what there was to be got.”
Von Hintze significantly recommends that the captain should be decorated
with the fourth class of the Order of the Red Eagle.
As I have stated elsewhere, I left Germany in October of 1914, with a
detailed plan of campaign for the “American front,” as Dr. Albert once
put it. My final instructions were simple and explicit.
“There must be constant uprisings in Mexico,” I was told, in effect.
“Villa, Carranza, must be reached. Zapata must continue his maraudings.
It does not matter in the least how you produce these results. Merely
produce them. All consuls have been instructed to furnish you with
whatever sums you need—_and they will not ask you any questions_.”
Rather complete, was it not? I left with every intention of carrying the
instructions out—and in a little over a week was made _hors de combat_.
It was then that von Rintelen, who had already planned to come over to
the United States in order to inaugurate a vast blockade running system,
undertook to add my undertaking to his own responsibilities.
What von Rintelen did is well known, so I shall only summarize it here.
His first act was an attempted restitution of General Huerta, which he
knew was the most certain method of causing intervention. Into this
enterprise both Boy-Ed and von Papen were impressed, and the three men
set about the task of making arrangements with former Huertistas for
a new uprising to be financed by German money. They sent agents to
Barcelona to persuade the former dictator to enter into the scheme; and
finally, when the general was on his way to America, they attempted to
arrange it so that he should arrive safely in New York and ultimately in
Mexico. It was a plan remarkably well conceived and well executed. It
would have succeeded but for one thing. General Huerta was captured by
the United States authorities at the very moment that he tried to cross
from Texas into Mexico!
But the indomitable von Rintelen was not discouraged. He had but one
purpose—to make trouble—and he made it with a will. He sent money to
Villa, and then, like the philanthropist in Chesterton’s play, supported
the other side by aiding Carranza, financing Zapata and starting two
other revolutions in Mexico. Meanwhile anti-American feeling continued
to be stirred up. German papers in Mexico presented the Fatherland’s
case as eloquently as they did elsewhere, and to a far more appreciative
audience. Carranza was encouraged in his rather unfriendly attitude
toward Washington. In a word, no step was neglected which would embarrass
the Wilson Administration and make peace between the two countries more
certain or more difficult to maintain.
Need I complete the story? Is it necessary to tell how, after the recall
of von Papen and Boy-Ed and the escape of von Rintelen, Mexico continued
to be used as the catspaw of the German plotters? Every one knows the
events of the last few months; of the concentration of German reservists
in various parts of Mexico; of the bitter attacks made upon the United
States by pro-German newspapers; and of the reports, greatly exaggerating
German activities in Mexico, which have been circulated with the direct
intention of provoking still more ill-feeling between the two countries
by leading Americans to believe that Mexico is honey-combed with German
conspiracies.
[Illustration: Cover of the British White Paper, containing von der
Goltz’s confession, and referring to him as “Bridgeman Taylor.”]
These activities have not applied to Mexico alone. It is significant that
twice in February of this year the Venezuelan Government has declined to
approve of the request of President Wilson that other neutral nations
join him in breaking diplomatic relations with Germany as a protest
against submarine warfare, and that many Venezuelan papers have stated
that this refusal is due to the representations of resident Germans, who
are many and influential. These are, of course, legitimate activities,
but they are in every case attended by a threat. Revolutions are easily
begun in Latin America, and the obstinate government can always be
brought to a reasonable viewpoint by the example of recent uprisings or
revolutions, financed by Germany, in Costa Rica, Peru and Cuba. Within
a very recent time, rumors were afloat in Venezuela that Germany was
assisting General Cipriano Castro in the revolutionary movement that he
had been organizing in Porto Rico. It was reported that there were on the
Colombian frontier many disaffected persons who would gladly join Castro
if he landed in Colombia and marched on Caracas, as he did successfully
in 1890.
For several years the Telefunken Co., a German corporation, has tried to
obtain from the Venezuelan Government a concession to operate a wireless
plant, which should be of greater power than any other in South America.
When this proposal was last made, certain ministers were for accepting
it, but the majority of the Government realized the uses to which the
plant could be put and refused to grant the concession. An alternative
proposal, made by the Government, to establish a station of less
strength, was rejected by the company.
Germany has steadily sought such wireless sites throughout this region.
Several have been established in Mexico, and in 1914 it was through
a wireless station in Colombia, that the German Admiral von Spee was
enabled to keep informed of the movements of the squadron of Admiral Sir
Christopher Cradock—information which resulted in the naval battle in
Chilean waters with a loss of three British battleships. It was after
this battle that Colombia ordered the closing of all wireless stations on
its coasts.
In Cuba, too, the hand of Germany has been evident, in spite of the
disclaimers which have been made by both parties in the recent
rebellion. That rebellion grew out of the contested election in November,
in which both President Menocal and the Liberal candidate, Alfredo
Zayas, claimed a victory. It is strange if this is the real cause of the
uprising, that hostilities did not begin until February 9, when General
Gomez, himself an ex-president, began a revolt in the eastern portion
of the island. The date is important; it was barely a week before new
elections were to be held in two disputed provinces and _only six days
after the United States had severed diplomatic relations with the German
Government, and but four days after President Menocal’s Government had
declared its intention of following the action of the United States_.
A little study of the personnel and developments of the rebellion form
convincing evidence as to its true backing. The Liberal Party is strongly
supported by the Spanish element of the population, who are almost
unanimously pro-German in their sympathies. All over the island, both
Germans and Spaniards have been arrested for complicity in the uprising.
Nor have the clergy escaped. Literally, dozens of bishops have been
jailed in Havana, upon the same charges.
It is also a notorious fact that the Mexicans have supported the
Liberals, and that the staffs of the Liberal newspapers are almost
exclusively composed of Mexican journalists. These newspapers were
suppressed at the beginning of the revolution.
But far more significant are the developments in the actual fighting.
Most of the action has taken place in the eastern provinces of Camaguey,
Oriente and Santa Clara—in which the most fertile fields of sugar cane
are situated. The damage to the cane fields has been estimated at
5,000,000 tons and is, _from a military standpoint, unnecessary_.
Col. Rigoberto Fernandez one of the revolutionary leaders, stated
that the rebels were plentifully supplied with hand-grenades and
artillery—although the reports prove that they had none. Was this an
empty boast—or may there be a connection between Fernandez’s statement
and the capture by the British of three German ships, which were found
off the Azores, laden with mines and arms?
I was in Havana in the latter part of March—upon a private errand,
although the Cuban papers persisted in imputing sinister designs to me.
Naturally, the Germans were not inclined to tell all their secrets, but
my Mexican acquaintances, all of whom were well informed regarding Cuban
affairs, gave me considerable information. Among other Mexicans I met
General Joaquin Maas, the former general of the Federal forces under
Huerta. The general has since made peace with Carranza and was at this
time acting as the latter’s go-between in negotiations with Germany. When
I last saw Maas, it was after the battle of El Paredo. He was about to
blow out his brains, but one of his lieutenants elegantly informed him
that he was a fool and dissuaded him from suicide. Maas received me with
the courtesy due a former opponent and was not averse to telling me much
about the situation. I also had ample occasion to speak with Spaniards,
whose sympathies were decidedly pro-German. Little by little I was
enabled to acquire a rather complete idea—not of the issues underlying
the Cuban revolution—but who had brought matters to a head. The answer
may be found in one word—Germany. German agents—notably one Dr. Hawe ben
Hawas, who recently took a mysterious botanizing expedition throughout
that part of Cuba, which later became the scene of revolutionary
activities, and who has thrice been arrested as a German spy—saw in
the political unrest of the country another opportunity to create a
diversion in favor of Germany. Cuba at peace was a valuable economic ally
of the United States. Cuba in rebellion was a source of annoyance to this
country, since it meant intervention, the political value of which was
unfavorable to the United States, and a serious loss in sugar, which is
one of the most important ingredients in the manufacture of several high
explosives.
Hence the burning of millions of tons of sugar cane. Hence the rebel
seizure of Santiago de Cuba. Hence the large number of negroes who joined
the rebel army, and whose labor is indispensable in the production of
sugar.
The ironic part of it all is that Germany had nothing to gain by a change
of government in Cuba. Any Cuban government must have a sympathetic
attitude toward the United States. What Germany wanted was a disruption
of the orderly life of the country—and she wanted it to continue for as
long a time as possible.
At the present writing the Cuban rebellion is ended. General Gomez and
his army have been captured, President Menocal is firmly seated in power
again, and the rebels hold only a few unimportant points. But much damage
has been done in the lessening of the sugar supply—and the rebellion has
also served its purpose as an illustration of Germany’s ability to make
trouble.
Germany has played a consistent game throughout. She has sought to use
all the existing weaknesses of the world for her own purposes—all the
rivalries, all the fears, all the antipathies, she has utilized as fuel
for her own fire. And yet, although she has played the game with the
utmost foresight, with a skill that is admirable in spite of its perverse
uses, and with an unfailing assurance of success—she has come to the
fourth year of the Great War with the fact of failure staring her in the
face.
But she has not given up. You may be sure that she has not given up.
CHAPTER XII.
_The last stand of German intrigue. Germany’s spy system in
America. What is coming?_
As I write these last few pages three clippings from recent newspapers
lie before me on my desk. One of them tells of the new era of good
feeling that exists between the governments of Mexico and the United
States, and speaks of the alliance of Latin-American republics against
German autocracy.
Another tells how the first contingent of American troops have landed in
France, after a successful battle with a submarine fleet. And a third
speaks of the victorious advance of the troops of Democratic Russia,
after the world had begun to believe that Russia had forgotten the war in
her new freedom.
I read them over again and I think that each one of these clippings, if
true, writes “failure” once again upon the book of German diplomacy.
I remember a day not so very many months ago, when a man with whom I had
some business in—for me—less quiet days, came to see me.
“B. E. is in town,” he said quietly. “He says he must see you. Can you
meet him at the —— Restaurant to-night?”
Boy-Ed! I was not surprised that he should be in this country, for I knew
the man’s audacity. But what could he want of me? Well, it would do no
harm to meet him, I thought, and, anyway, my curiosity was aroused.
I nodded.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “At what hour?”
“Six-thirty,” my friend replied. “It’s only for a minute. He is leaving
to-night.”
That evening for the first time in two years I saw the man who had done
his share in the undermining of America. I did not ask him what his
presence in this country meant, and needless to say, he did not inform me.
Our business was of a different character. I had just arranged to write
a series of newspaper articles exposing the operations of the Kaiser’s
secret service and Boy-Ed tried to induce me to suppress them.
“I cannot do it,” I told him.
But the captain showed a remarkable knowledge of my private affairs.
“Under your contract,” he said, “the articles cannot be published until
you have endorsed them. As you have not yet affixed your signature to
them, you can suppress them by merely withholding your endorsement.”
This I declined to do and our conversation ended.
Shortly afterward, Boy-Ed returned to Germany on the U-53. He did not
attempt to see me again, but three times within the following weeks,
attempts were made upon my life. Later, pressure was brought to bear
from sources close to the German Embassy, but they failed to secure the
suppression of the articles.
But my curiosity was aroused as to the meaning of Boy-Ed’s presence here
and I set to work to discover the purpose of it. This was not difficult,
for although I have ceased to be a secret agent, I am still in touch with
many who formerly gave me information, and I know ways of discovering
many things I wish to learn.
Soon I had the full story of Boy-Ed’s latest activities in this country.
He had, I learned, gone first to Mexico in an attempt to pave the way for
that last essay at a Mexican-Japanese alliance, which the discovery of
the famous Zimmermann note later made public. Whether he had succeeded
or no, I did not discover at the time. But what was more important, I did
learn that while he was in Mexico, Boy-Ed had selected and established
several submarine bases for Germany! His plans had also carried him to
San Francisco, to which he had gone disguised only by a mustache. There
he had identified several men who were needed by the counsel of the
defense of the German Consul Bopp, who had been arrested on a charge of
conspiracy and for fomenting sedition within the United States.
From the Pacific Coast Boy-Ed had gone to Kansas City and had bought off
a witness who had intended to testify for the United States in the trial
of certain German agents. Thence, after a private errand of his own, he
had made his way to New York, _en route_ to Newport and Germany.
It may be well here to comment upon one feature of the Zimmermann note
which has generally escaped attention. It was through no blunder of
the German Government that that document came into possession of the
United States, as I happen to know. I have pointed out before that
diplomatic negotiations are carried through in the following manner. The
preliminary negotiations are conducted by men of unofficial standing
and it is not until the attitude of the various governments involved is
thoroughly understood by each of them that final negotiations are drawn
up. Now, although no negotiations had taken place between Germany, Japan
and Mexico, the form of the Zimmermann note would seem to indicate that
there was a thorough understanding between these countries. They were
drawn up in this form with a purpose. Germany wished the United States to
conclude that Mexico and Japan were hostile to her; Germany hoped that
this country would be outwardly silent about the Zimmermann note but
would take some diplomatic action against Mexico and Japan which would
inevitably draw these two countries into an anti-American alliance.
Did President Wilson perceive this thoroughly Teutonic plot? I cannot
say; but at any rate upon February 28, he astounded America by revealing
once again Germany’s evil intentions toward the United States, and by
so doing not only defeated the German Government’s particular plan but
effectively cemented public opinion in this country, bringing it to
a unanimous support of the government in the crisis which was slowly
driving it toward war.
That marked the last stand of German intrigue, as it was conducted before
the war. Now there is a new danger—a danger whose concrete illustration
lies before me in the account of that first engagement between United
States warships and German submarines.
The people of the United States, just entered into active participation
in the war, are faced with a new peril—the betrayal of military and naval
secrets to representatives of the German Government working in this
country. Not only was it known to Germany that American troops had been
sent to France, but the very course that the transports were to take had
been communicated to Berlin. It is probable that other news of equal
value has been or is being sent to Germany at the present time; and the
United States is confronted with the possibility of submarine attacks
upon its troop ships, as well as other dangers which, if not properly
combated, may result in serious losses and greatly hamper it in its
conduct of the war.
What exactly is this spy peril which this country now faces and which
constitutes a far greater, because less easily combated danger than
actual warfare?
How can it be got rid of?
These are the questions which the American people and the American
Government are asking themselves and must ask themselves if they are to
bear an effective share in the war in which they are now engaged.
Because of my former connection with the German Government and my work as
a secret agent both in Europe and America, in the former of which I was
brought into intimate contact with the workings of the secret service in
other countries, I am prepared to give a reliable account of the general
structure and workings of the German spy system in the United States as
it is to-day.
It is important to remember that the secret diplomatic service, as it was
conducted in this country before the war, and with which I was connected,
is entirely different both in its personnel and methods with the spy
system which is in operation to-day. A little further on I shall point
out why this is so and why it must be so.
Before the entry of the United States into the war, the principal
activities of the German Government’s agents were confined to the
fomenting of strikes in munitions plants and other war activities, the
organizing of plots to blow up ships, canals, or bridges—anything
which would hamper the transportation of supplies to the Allies—and the
inciting of sedition by stirring up trouble between German-Americans and
Americans of other descent. All of these acts were committed in order to
prevent you from aiding in any way the enemies of Germany; and also, by
creating disorder in this country in peace times to furnish you with an
object lesson of what could be done in war times.
These things were planned, overseen and executed by Germans and by other
enemies of the Allies, under the leadership of men like von Papen, who
were accredited agents of the German Government and who were protected by
diplomatic immunity.
Now that war has come an entirely new task is before the German
Government and an entirely new set of people are needed to do it. Wartime
spying is absolutely different from the work which was done before the
war, and the two have no connection with each other—except as the work
done before the war has prepared the way for the work which is being done
now.
And whereas the work done before the war was conducted by Germans, the
present work, for very obvious reasons, cannot be done by any one who is
a German or who is likely to be suspected of German affiliations.
I venture to say that not one per cent. of the persons who are engaged in
spying for the German Government at the present time are either of German
birth or descent.
I say this, not because I know how the German secret service is being
conducted in this country, but because I know how it has been conducted
in other countries.
Let me explain. It is obvious that such activities as the inciting to
strikes, and the conspiring which were done in the last three years
could be safely conducted by Germans, because the two countries were at
peace. The moment that war was declared, every German became an object
of suspicion, and his usefulness in spying—that is, the obtaining of
military, naval, political and diplomatic secrets—was ended immediately.
For that reason Germany and every other government which has spies in
the enemy country make a practice during war of employing practically no
known citizens of its own country.
At the present time more than ninety per cent. of the German spies in
England are Englishmen. The rest are Russians, Dutchmen, Roumanians—what
you will—anything but Germans.
One of the former heads of the French secret service in this country was
a man who called himself Guillaume. His real name is Wilhelm and he was
born in Berlin!
For that reason to arrest such men as Carl Heynen or Professor Hanneck is
merely a precautionary measure. Whatever connection these men may have
had with the German Government formerly, their work is now done, and
their detention does not hinder the workings of the real spy system one
iota.
HOW THE SPY SYSTEM WORKS.
It is difficult to distinguish between the work done in neutral countries
by the secret diplomatic agent—the man who is engaged in fomenting
disorders, such as I have described—and the spy, who is seeking military
information which may be of future use. The two work together in that the
secret agent reports to Berlin the names of inhabitants of the country
concerned, who may be of use in securing information of military or naval
value. It is well to remember, however, that the real spy always works
alone. His connection with the government is known only to a very few
officials, and is rarely or never suspected by the people who assist him
in securing information. Here permit me to make a distinction between
two classes of spies: the agents or directors of espionage, who know
what they are doing; and the others, the small fry, who secure bits of
information here and there and pass it on to their employers, the agents,
often without realizing the real purpose of their actions.
In the building of the spy system in America, Germans and
German-Americans have been used. Business houses, such as banks and
insurance companies, which have unusual opportunities of obtaining
information about their clients—most of whom, in the case of German
institutions in this country, are of German birth or descent—have been of
service in bringing the directors of spy work into touch with people who
will do the actual spying.
The German secret service makes a point of having in its possession lists
of people who are in a position to find out facts of greater or less
importance about government officials. Housemaids, small tradesmen, and
the like, can be of use in the compiling of data about men of importance,
so that their personal habits, their financial status, their business
and social relationships become a matter of record for future use. These
facts are secured, usually by a little “jollying” rather than the payment
of money, by the local agent—a person sometimes planted in garrison
towns, state capitals, etc.—who is paid a comparatively small monthly sum
for such work. This information is passed to a director of spies, who
thereby discovers men who are in a position to supply him with valuable
data and who determine whether or not they can be reached.
Now, just how is this “reaching” done? Mainly, I think it safe to say,
by blackmail and intimidation. If from this accumulated gossip about
his intended victim—who may be an army or naval officer, a manufacturer
of military supplies, or a government clerk—the spy learns of some
indiscretion committed by the man or his wife, he uses it as a club in
obtaining information that he desires. Or he may hear that a man is in
financial straits. He will make a point of seeing that his victim is
helped, and then will make use of the latter’s friendship to worm facts
out of him. In this way, sometimes without the suspicion of the victim
being aroused, little bits of information are secured, which may be of
no importance in themselves, but are of immense value when considered in
conjunction with facts acquired elsewhere.
Ultimately the victim will balk or become suspicious. Then he is offered
the alternative of continuing to supply information or of being exposed
for his previous activities. Generally he accepts the lesser evil.
In this manner the spy system is built up even in peace times. The
tremendous sums of money that are spent in this manner amount to
millions. The quantity of information secured is on the other hand,
inconceivably small for the most part. But in the mass of useless and
superfluous facts that are supplied to the spies and through them to the
government, are to be found a few that are worth the cost of the system.
By the time war breaks out, if it does, the German Government has in its
possession innumerable facts about the equipment of the army and navy of
its enemy—and more important still, it has in its power men, sometimes
high in the confidence of the enemy government, who can be forced into
giving additional information when needed.
Now, the moment that war breaks out, what happens? The German Government
has distributed throughout the country thousands of men and women
who have legitimate business there; it has its hands on men who are
not spies, but who will betray secrets for a price either in money or
security; it is acquainted with the strength and weakness of fortresses,
various units of the service, the exact armament of every ship in the
navy, the resources of munition factories—in a word almost all of the
essential details about that country’s fighting and economic strength. It
also knows what portion of the populace are inclined to be disaffected.
And it is thoroughly familiar with the strategical points of that
country, so that in case of invasion it may strike hard and effectively.
What is must learn now is:
First, what are the present military and naval activities of the enemy.
Second, what are they planning to do.
Finally, the German Government must learn the how, why, when and where of
each of these things.
That, with the machinery at its command, is not so difficult as it would
seem.
Here is where the value of the minor bits of information comes in. A
trainman tells, for instance, that he has seen a trainload of soldiers
that day, upon such and such a line. A similar report comes in from
elsewhere. Meantime another agent has reported that a certain packing
house has shipped to the government so many tons of beef; while still
another announces the delivery at a particular point of a totally
different kind of supplies. Do you not see how all these facts, taken
together, and coupled with an accurate knowledge of transportation
conditions and of the geographical structure of the country would
constitute an important indication of an enemy’s plans, even failing the
possession of any absolute secrets? Do you not suppose that weeks before
you were aware that any United States soldiers had sailed for France, the
Germans might have known of all the preparations that were being made
and could deduce accurately the number of troops that were sailing, and
many facts of importance about their equipment. There is no need for the
betrayal of secrets for this kind of information to become known. It is a
mere matter of detective work.
But mark one feature of it. These facts are communicated by different
spies—not to a central clearing house of information in this country,
as has been surmised, but to various points outside the country for
transmission to the Great General Staff. They are duplicated endlessly
by different agents. They are sent to many different people for
transmission. _And even if half of the reports were lost, or half of the
spies were discovered, there would still be a sufficient number left to
carry on their work successfully._
Germany does not depend upon one spy alone for even the smallest item.
Always the work is duplicated. Always the same information is being
secured by several men, not one of whom knows any of the others; and
always that information is transmitted to Berlin through so many diverse
channels that it is impossible for the most vigilant secret service in
the world to prevent a goodly part of it from reaching its destination.
How that information is transmitted I shall tell in a moment. First, I
wish to explain how more important facts are secured—the secret plans of
the government, such, for instance, as the course which had been decided
upon for the squadron which carried the first American troops to France.
It is obvious that such facts as these could not have been deduced from
a mass of miscellaneous reports. That secret must have been learned in
its entirety. Exactly how it was discovered I do not pretend to know
nor shall I offer any theories. But here, in a situation of this sort,
unquestionably, is where the real spy—the “master spy,” if you wish to
call him so—steps in.
Now, it is impossible, in spite of the utmost vigilance, to keep an
important document from the knowledge of all but one or two people.
No matter how secret, it is almost certain to pass through the hands
of a number of officials and possibly several clerks. And with every
additional person who knows of it, the risk of discovery or betrayal is
correspondingly increased. If in code, it may be copied or memorized by a
spy who is in a position to get hold of it, or by a person who is in the
power of that spy! Once in Berlin, it can be deciphered. For the General
Staff and the Admiralty have their experts in these matters who are very
rarely defeated.
You may be sure that Germany has made her utmost efforts to put her spies
into high places in this country, just as she has tried to do elsewhere.
You may be sure, also, that she has neglected no opportunity to gain
control over any official or any naval or army officer—however important
or unimportant—whom the agents could influence. That has always been her
method; nor is it difficult to see why it frequently succeeds.
Imagine the situation of a man who in time of peace had supplied, either
innocently or otherwise, a foreign agent with information which possessed
a considerable value. It is probable that he would revolt at a suggestion
that he do it in time of war—but with his neck once in the German noose,
with the alternative of additional compliance or exposure facing him,
it is not hard to see how some men would become conscious traitors and
others would be driven to suicide.
By a system of blackmail and intimidation the Germans have attempted to
force into their ranks many people from whom they extort information that
would now be regarded as traitorous, although formerly it might have been
given out in all innocence.
Undoubtedly it was for purposes of intimidation that von Papen carried
with him to England papers incriminating Germans and German-Americans
who had been associated with him in one way or another. And why did von
Rintelen return to this country and aid this government in exposing
the German affiliations of people who had no German blood in them? The
obvious answer is that those people had balked at aiding him in some
scheme he had proposed. Therefore he made examples of them, with the
double purpose of demonstrating to the United States the extent of German
intrigue and of filling other implicated people with fear of the exposure
that would come to them if they were not more compliant.
Once in possession of secret information, the spy is faced with the
necessity of transmitting it to Berlin. Here again, the spy who is a
German would meet with considerable difficulty. He may mail letters if
no mail censorship has been instituted; but these are liable to seizure
and are not so useful in the transmission of war secrets as they were in
informing his government before the war of more or less standard facts
about the strength of fortifications and the like. He may use private
messengers—as do all spies—but the delay in this method is a severe
handicap.
In sending news of the movements of troops, speed is the prime essential.
Consequently he must communicate either by wireless or by cable. How does
he do it?
There are innumerable ways. There may be in the confidential employ
of many business houses which do a large cable business with neutral
countries men who are either agents or dupes of the German Government.
These men may send cables which seem absolutely innocent business
messages, but which if properly read impart facts of military value to
the recipient in Holland, say, or in Spain or South America. It is not a
difficult matter to use business codes, giving to the terms an entirely
different meaning from the one assigned in the code-book. Personal
messages are also used in this way, as is well known. As to the wireless,
although all stations are under rigid supervision, what is to prevent the
Germans from establishing a wireless station in the Kentucky Mountains,
for instance, and for a time operating it successfully?
But in spite of all cable censorship, the spy can smuggle information
into Mexico, where it can be cabled or wirelessed on to Berlin, either
directly or indirectly by way of one of the neutral countries. Even in
spite of the most rigid censorship of mails and telegrams this sort of
smuggling can be accomplished.
When I was in the Constitutional Army in Mexico, I used to receive
revolver ammunition from an old German who carried it over the border _in
his wooden leg_. Could not this method be applied to dispatches?
There are numerous authenticated cases of spies who have sent messages
concealed in sausages or other articles of food. Moreover, the current
of the Rio Grande at certain places runs in such a manner that a log or
a bucket dropped in on the American side will drift to the Mexican shore
and arrive at a point which can be determined with almost mathematical
certainty.
I mention those instances merely to show how little of real value the
censorship of cables and mails can accomplish. The question arises: What
can be done? I shall try to indicate the answer.
HOW TO GET RID OF THE SPY SYSTEM.
I say frankly that I think it absolutely impossible to eradicate spies
from any country. Certainly it cannot be done in a week or a year, or
even in many years. It is more than probable that the German spy systems
in France and England are more complete to-day than they were at the
beginning of the war. Three years ago the spies in those countries were
made up of both experienced and inexperienced men. Now the bunglers have
been weeded out, and only those who are expert in defying detection
remain. But these are the only men who were ever of real use to Germany;
and fortified as they are by three years of unsuspected work in these
countries, they are enabled to secure information of infinitely more
worth than they formerly were. What is the situation in America?
I have shown you the structure of that system. Let me repeat again that
Germany has installed in this country thousands of men, whose nationality
and habits are such as to protect them from suspicion, who work silently
and alone, because they know that their very lives depend upon their
silence, and who are in communication with no central spy organization,
for the very simple reason that no such organization exists. There is no
clearing house for spy information in this country. There are no “master
spies.”
Do you think that the German Government would risk the success of a work
so important as this, by organizing a system which the arrest of any one
man or group of men would betray? The idea of centralization in this
work is popular at present. In theory it is a good one. In practise it
is impossible. By the very nature of the spy’s trade, he must run alone,
and not only be unsuspected of any connection with Germany now, but be
believed never to have had such a connection. If the secret service
were a chain, the loss of one link would break it. With a system of
independent units, endlessly overlapping, eternally duplicating each
other’s work, they continue their practices even though half of their
number are caught.
Now with these men, protected as they are by the fact that not even their
fellows know them, with their wits sharpened by three years of silent
warfare against the agents of other governments and your own neutrality
squad, the task of ferreting them out is an utterly impossible one. You
cannot prevent spies from securing information.
You cannot prevent the transmission of that information to Berlin,
without instituting, not a censorship, but a complete suppression of all
communications of any sort.
But you can do much to counteract their methods by doing two things:
I. Delaying all mails and cables, other than actual government messages.
II. Instituting a system of counter espionage, which shall have for
its object the detection _but not the arrest_ of enemy spies; and the
dissemination of misleading information.
The war work of the spy depends for success upon the speed with which he
can communicate new facts to Berlin. If all his messages are delayed, his
effectiveness is severely crippled.
If in addition to that, all persons sending suspicious messages anywhere
are carefully shadowed; if their associations are looked up, it may be
possible to determine from whom they are getting information, and by
seeing that incorrect reports are given them, render them of negligible
value to their employers.
Public arrests of suspected men are worthless. Such disclosures only
serve to put the real spies on their guard. But if the spies are allowed
to work in fancied security, it will be possible to find out just what
they know and the government can change its plans at the last moment and
so nullify their efforts.
Eternal vigilance, here as elsewhere, is the price of security. Germany
has regarded the work of her spies as of almost as much importance as
the force in the field. She has spent millions of dollars in building up
a system in this country, whose ramifications extend to all points of
your national life. And since upon this system rests all of her hopes of
rendering worthless your participation in the war, she will not lightly
let it fail.
I toss aside my clippings and sit looking out into the New York street
which shows such little sign of war as yet. Defeat! That is the end
of this silent warfare, this secret underground attack that has in it
nothing of humanity or honor. I think of Germany, a country of quiet,
peaceful folk as I once knew it, bearing no malice, going cheerfully
about their work, seeking their destiny with a will that has nothing in
it of conquest. And I think of Germany embattled, ruled by a group of
iron men who see only their own ambitions as a goal—who have brought upon
the country and the world this three-year tyranny of hate.
What will be the end? Will the war go on, eating up the lives and honor
of men with its monstrous appetite? Or will there be peace—a peace that
will bring nothing of revenge or oppression; that will carry with it
only a desire for justice to all the peoples of the earth—that will kill
forever this desire for conquest which now and in the past has borne only
sorrow and bloodshed as its fruit? Will the peace bring forgetfulness of
the past, in so far as men _can_ forget?
That would be worth fighting for.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1] You will find an interesting account of the effect of this treaty
upon Persia in William Morgan Shuster’s valuable book, “The Strangling of
Persia.”
[2] Mr. Edward I. Bell, in his “The Political Shame of Mexico.”
[3] It is interesting to remember that Captain von Papen had in the
earlier part of the year, while he was still in Mexico, conducted an
investigation into the types of explosives used in Mexico for similar
enterprises. This investigation had been undertaken at the request of
the German Ministry of War. Letters regarding this matter were found in
Captain von Papen’s effects by the British authorities, and are printed
in the British White Papers, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1916).
[4] Fritzen, who was captured in Hartwood, Cal., on March 9, 1917, was
arraigned in New York City on March 16, and after pleading not guilty,
later reversed his plea. He is at present serving a term of eighteen
months in a Federal prison.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY ADVENTURES AS A GERMAN SECRET AGENT ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
